... [The stark] style serves Mr. DeLillo's purpose, which is to write about a world reduced by horror to a kind of elective mutism. It is the prose equivalent of Keith's [the main character's] state of mind: "He used to want to fly out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw motion. Now he finds himself drifting into spells of reflection, thinking not in clear units, hard and linked, but only absorbing what comes, drawing things out of time and memory and into some dim space that bears his collected experience."

... Mr. DeLillo confronts [the event] head-on, with graphic realism. The novel begins with a prose transcription of the video images we all know so well: "It was not a street anymore but a world, and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads."

... Mr. DeLillo's aim in "Falling Man" is almost that of a lyric poet — not so much to tell a story as to evoke a state of mind. What we learn about Keith and Lianne [his ex-wife], and their families, friends, and neighbors, is kept to a deliberate minimum. We know them less as people with histories than as psychic litmus strips, dipped into the poison of September 11 and brought out blanched with dread. When we first glimpse Keith, he is literally drained of color, covered in ash from the collapsing towers. He managed to escape after the first plane hit, but his friend and poker buddy Rumsey died in his arms, and he can't stop reliving the Dantesque procession down the stairwell — thousands of office workers who know they might already be dead.


... Keith, an inveterate adulterer, starts a new kind of affair, with Florence, a woman whose briefcase he accidentally carried home on September 11. But sex with Florence means less to him than their sessions of storytelling, in which they endlessly relive the trek down the stairs. These passages are some of the best in the novel, showing that Mr. DeLillo has absorbed the survivors' accounts and raised them to the universality of myth, or nightmare: "They were moving out of the worst of the smoke now and this is when she saw a dog, a blind man and a guide dog, not far ahead, and it was like something out of the Bible, she thought." ...