'Heat, Then Fuel, Then Fire'

...next in Florida, where he trains on a flight simulator...

...Within the narrow scope of his interests—sex, poker, male friendship— he is thoughtful but mired in a permanent state of late adolescence, and we are told that as a younger man he was a failed actor...

...It eludes Keith and Lianne, resigned to their “extended grimness” and unable to transcend their imperfect selves...

...He stood and looked at him and the man opened his eyes and died...

...Keith held tight to the belt buckle...

...Lianne is a witness to Keith’s descent...

...Falling Man teems with such alternate selves, both imagined and real...

...The “language and vision” Hammad learns from Atta are perverse...

...She is Florence Givens, “a lightskinned black woman, his age or close, and gentle-seeming, and on the heavy side...

...We meet him f irst in Hamburg, where he has joined up with Mohammad Atta...

...She remembers herself in childhood the “girl who wanted to be other people...

...After each segment, the narrative takes up the perspective of Hammad, a fictional hijacker...

...The last third of the novel starts with Lianne and the couple’s son, Justin, marching at a war protest on August 29, 2004...

...In DeLillo’s unflinching vision of 9/11 and its aftermath, the living are the lucky ones...

...Lianne’s mother’s German boyfriend who goes by an assumed name and may have acted as a terrorist in the 1970s, spouts anti-American sentiments not far from those held by Hammad and his comrades...

...The line evokes Rimbaud’s famous “I is someone else,” and it echoes an idea DeLillo has expressed many times over the years...

...Thirty-nine years old, brutish and laconic, he convincingly represents the class of corporate mercenaries who inhabit Manhattan’s high-rises and sports bars...

...In his mind the casino becomes a church as well as a workplace...

...The second section begins with a return to September 11: Keith—again covered in blood, “slivered glass in his face”— is seen arriving at his former apartment on the Upper East Side through the eyes of his estranged wife Lianne...

...Divided into three parts, it opens on the morning of the attacks as a lawyer, Keith Neudecker, escapes from his office in the World Trade Center...

...Keith begins an affair with Florence that expires quickly, and is recalled three years later with near indifference as he sits in a casino...

...As the “extended grimness called their marriage” resumes, she watches, waits and thinks...

...DeLillo’s characters similarly grope at meanings, and leave his novels disquieted— perhaps changed by time, but unimproved, unredeemed...

...Missing for them is a sense of life imparted with meaning by the hand of an artist...

...Much of the section is spent with Keith in Las Vegas, where he flies regularly to gamble...

...The section concludes on October 17, 2001—10 days into the Nato invasion of Afghanistan and the anniversary of the 23rd Street Fire of 1966 that killed 12 New York firefighters...

...And by the novel’s end the dead killers are the only ones who might be said to have “found meaning...

...A performance artist known as Falling Man drops from high places in a safety harness, simulating the plummet of a man Keith sees jumping out of a tower window in the final scene...

...As he told an interviewer in 1991: “I do think we can connect novelists and terrorists here...

...There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to...

...Reality is enacted, not interpreted...

...Only one character completely sheds his true identity: Hammad ponders his imminent suicide and mass murder while sitting in a barber’s chair, shorn of the pious beard he wore in Hamburg...

...On regular trips home, “every time he boarded a flight he glanced at faces on both sides of the aisle, trying to spot the man or men who might be a danger to them all...

...The sentence is constructed around a comma splice, and the violence it does to grammar is intended to imitate the terrorist’s disruption of the ordinary...

...True terror is a language and a vision...

...DeLillo’s including Hammad in a novel about a survivor and his family seems strange, and half-hearted, until this stunning sentence a few pages from the book’s end, as Hammad sits guarding the cockpit: “ A bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty, making an arc one way and rolling back the other, and he watched it spin more quickly and then skitter across the floor an instant before the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then fuel, then f ire, and a blast wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall...

...She also worries—about her son, her mother and her own memory...

...and finally on board American Airlines Flight 11...

...She counsels a group of senior citizens in the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease, an affliction that drove her father to suicide...

...Those who will die have no claim to their lives outside the useful fact of their dying,” Atta tells him...

...Keith Neudecker is not an appealing hero...

...Reviewed by Christian Lorentzen Associate editor, “Harper’s” Don Delillo’s 9/11 novel offers no consolations...

...That Late disclosure serves to make sense of Keith’s drift, or fall, over the course of the book into compulsive—one might say religious—gambling...

...In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that’s filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act...

...Having carried a stranger’s briefcase out of the north tower, Keith tracks down its owner...

...What emotion Keith does muster attaches to the memory of Rumsey, his colleague and opponent at a regular poker game...

...That last phrase, delivered in Keith’s voice, with the extra “and,” is one of the darkly satiric not-quitejokes DeLillo makes throughout Falling Man, to unsettling effect...

...Staring into the mirror, he reflects, “He was not here, it was not him...

...People who are powerless make an open theater of violence...

...He is actually a frustrated avenger, and poker becomes a way to sublimate an impulse toward violence on display earlier when a man seems to be insulting Florence and Keith assaults him, “ready to kill...

...The novel's closing pages relate Keith’s attempt to drag an unconscious Rumsey out of the burning building: “The whole business of being Rumsey was in shambles now...

...His fragmentary approach has exasperated many critics and readers, who feel they have been denied the satisfactions of a raditional structure: character development, plot, resolution...

...DeLillo, a master of the anticlimax, has always resisted telling stories, preferring instead to compose fictions that are accumulations of moments...