To be brutally honest, I do not care where you were when the towers fell—and my money says there aren’t many who do.

This is the staple question: Where were you when—? Prior to September 11, 2001, the question almost invariably referred to JFK. The grassy knoll. The square. The bullet. And the subjective litany of associative mysteries—to each his own. Where was I? In 1963, a shadow of some thought, one possibility planned on a wet bar napkin as my parents cried for their dead president and considered having children. In 2001, I was standing on a public bus in Flushing, on my way to the train. Neither story is particularly interesting, but that’s not the problem. The problem is the question. We’re asking the wrong question.

In 1988, DeLillo asked the odd question, apparently considered criminal by some, Where were you before? Most surprising, he asked Oswald. That novel, Libra, remains a fascinating and troubling meditation on one possible prologue to tragedy. One of the reasons why Libra works so well, indeed, why DeLillo’s entire catalog remains so intriguing, is his preference to address his subjects peripherally. He “tends to write around…subjects,” notes DeLillo scholar, David Cowart, “almost like a moth wise enough to know the annihilating power of the flame that attracts it.” In Libra, DeLillo addresses the very act that broke the American back nearly 50 years ago. A mere nine months into this new millennia and, once again, random terror paralyzed any coherent sense of personal or national security on that historic day downtown. And this time the face was brown. Not “one of ours, which meant godless, Western, white,” as DeLillo describes the European face of terror in his new novel, Falling Man. DeLillo cares very little about “where we were when,” for that matter, where his protagonist Keith Neudecker was. DeLillo cares for what came before, and what came afterward. To look directly at the sun is to blind oneself. One must look to the side.

Falling Man has seemed virtually inevitable. Consider the gripping and sinister cover photo for the mammoth Underworld. The towers standing tall, breaking through the metropolis heavens. The menacing cross in the foreground, between the two. A bird just below their tall rooftops, obscured by cloud.

Consider his 1977 novel of urban terrorism, Players, in which one protagonist, Pam, works within the World Trade Center, north tower. Pam is employed by “the Grief Management Council”—”a large and growing personal-services organization whose clinics, printed material and trained counselors served the community in its efforts to understand and assimilate grief.” It was “Pam’s original view that the World Trade Center was an unlikely headquarters for such an outfit as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief? …To Pammy the towers didn’t seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light.”

Let me confess, I’ve been waiting for this story. More precisely—I have been waiting for DeLillo to write this story. Indeed, there has been no shortage of talk regarding the 9/11 novel. Too early? Too funny? Too little? Too much? Frankly, I’m tired of it. It risks doing more disservice to the fallen and afflicted than any mediocre book might. Some notable examples: Ian McEwen’s Saturday deftly kept the terrible business aside, so as to suggest its osmotic presence in this shrinking world. And Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close gave it face—quirky, humorous, grieved—but, inextricably, the face of Foer as well. Falling Man, however, is the novel that looks so closely one disappears within its elements. What we see is the disturbing, the loving, the frightening and banal.

A testament to DeLillo’s narrative intuition—the opening pages literally place the reader at Ground Zero, in “the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now,” he writes, as Nuedecker makes his way through the “stink of fuel fire, and the rip of sirens in the air.” All else is aftermath. In one sense, the concrete articulation of the event is incredibly moving, even harrowing, yet ultimately deflating. This is DeLillo’s best card. The reader is forced to move forward at face value, to accept the remainder as “now.” Emotionally, one is spent, and DeLillo spends the following 200 pages rebuilding the reader. “I think fiction rescues history from its confusions,” DeLillo once told interviewer Anthony Decurtis. “It can do this in the somewhat superficial way of filling in blank spaces. But it can also operate in a deeper way: providing the balance and rhythm we don’t experience in our daily lives, our real lives. The novel within history can operate outside it.” This is precisely what Falling Man does; it provides balance and rhythm.

Keith Neudecker is only one of many falling men in this novel. After surviving the fall of the two towers, Keith finds himself at the door of his estranged wife and child with a stranger’s briefcase found in the stairwell. What follows, page after page, are the fractured glimpses of Keith’s network of family, friends, and lovers, as each try to reconcile what has taken place and what is. We are given intimate glimpses, as in his wife, Lianne grappling with a slow rising prejudice (Lianne increasingly becomes the novel’s second face); some as remote as the Falling Man himself, a performance artist that suspends himself by wire throughout the city referencing that peaceful, yet distressing photo we’ve all come to know so well. Even some glimpses of the men that tried to kill him; Mohammed Atta makes one brief appearance among a handful of surprisingly emotive and suspenseful narrative fragments that present a pre-9/11 Al Qaeda.

The Neudeckers attempt to piece together the broken fragments of their lives—fragments blown apart both before and as a result of the fall. In a particularly arresting passage, DeLillo finds a most fitting and visceral metaphor. Keith’s doctor informs him,

“‘In those places where it happens, the survivors, the people nearby who are injured, sometimes, months later, they develop bumps, for lack of a better term, and it turns out this is caused by small fragments, tiny fragments of the suicide bomber’s body. The bomber is blown to bits, literally to bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who’s in striking range….They call this organic shrapnel.’”

Falling Man has all that one has come to expect from DeLillo: obsession with numbers and language, the children who look beyond language (or is it wholly within it?), all of the precision and ambiguity that one consistently finds in his work. Really, there’s actually nothing new here. Although, I would argue, this is Falling Man’s greatest strength. I do not care where DeLillo was on September 11, 2001. I certainly do not care for a stranger’s construction, an architected version of my very real and existing emotion—much less than that of this city, this nation. What I want is a story. And DeLillo knows that to tell a powerful story is to look aside from it. Falling Man will not be for everyone. It does not heal. At times it feels so methodically structured that one might picture DeLillo at his keyboard in white surgical gloves. His precision, however, the cold, nearly clinical objective perspective is what allows for insight. Falling Man presents readers with each puzzling piece of what may otherwise achieve a singular emotional wallop, yet DeLillo refuses to piece them together. Rather we are led to the novel’s inescapable and stunning conclusion—sans redemption, epiphany or applause. This, I like.

In fact, from the book’s cover image of the two towers sitting safely and alone among blue clouds, a high bird’s eye view, one is practically presented with the book in its entire. Do they rest in some skyscraper afterlife, foundation among the heavens? Or do we see them upon arrival, out of that small oval window from inside the fast and incoming airplane? Either way, we are simultaneously here, in the now; and we are before, we are after. DeLillo has remarked, “Art is one of the consolation prizes we receive for having lived in a difficult and sometimes chaotic world.” Falling Man is just this, a consolation prize—necessary, rewarding and difficult to accept. Accept it, at the very least, gracefully.

Previously published in 72nd Ave. Magazine, Vol. I/Issue 3

Scott Cheshire is a writer who lives and works in New York.