"Falling Man" and Summer Reading

I recently finished reading a novel called Falling Man by Don DeLillo, a popular writer who I'd never before encountered. I'd read some really interesting reviews of the book on Slate and The New York Times Sunday Book Review Online and read the first chapter on The New York Times. I decided to try it out on a whim since I had a coupon for Borders, and I was most certainly not disappointed.

It's a story about September 11th that follows the dual perspectives of a survivor of the attacks who worked in one of the towers, Keith (his story begins on September 11th and proceeds from there), and of one of the terrorists (his story leads up to the September 11th attacks). It would have been easy for an author of less inherent skill to oversentimentalize the attacks. In the collective minds of Americans, September 11th has become a sort of rallying cry for freedom-mongering and rah-rah sentiments, and it's an extraordinary achievement that DeLillo manages to strip the day back to what it was as it was happening - an extraordinarily confusing day full of an indescribable amount of grief and human suffering that has left the world indelibly different and at the same time indescribably the same as before.

Interesting subplots, including one in particular involving the novel's title character, a performance artist who specializes in dangling in formal dress from bridges, scaffolds, and other scary-looking places, and another involving Keith's wife Lianne and the group she runs for Alzheimer's patients involving the chronicling of their thoughts on a variety of democratically decided-upon topics, make this novel something richer and more fulfilling than just another "smoke and ash" chronicle of the events of September 11, 2001.

DeLillo's writing style, which, at times, reminded me of Joan Didion's, is appropriately sparse. Without sounding cold, DeLillo uses particularly cutting language to strip down his prose to the most emotionally intense state possible. It's a short book, coming in at 246 pages, but it packs a wallop that will leave you thinking about the book once its over. Falling Man comes highly recommended. Now I want to check out more of DeLillo's books, perhaps Underworld or White Noise.

Other books I want to read this summer include:

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
and On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan.

Hopefully I'll be reporting on more of my summer reading shortly! Right now I'm reading Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's.