Falling Man, by Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo's new novel takes place in the hours, then the days, then the years after the September 11 attacks. It follows the lives of Keith Neudecker, an office worker who walks out through the smoke and flame of the North Tower carrying a briefcase that doesn't belong to him, and his estranged wife Leanne, to whose house he returns after the towers fall. In the weeks that follow Keith begins an affair with the woman whose briefcase he retrieved, then, thrilled by unsafety, he takes up professional gambling. His wife visits her dying mother and argues with her mother's raffish lover, who may himself have belonged to a German terrorist group in the 1970s. Their seven-year-old, meanwhile, steals the family binoculars to watch the skies, dreading the reappearance of a bearded assassin whose name he mishears as Bill Lawton. And all over New York there are sightings of a performance artist called the Falling Man, who dresses in a suit and safety harness and throws himself from buildings, hanging in eerie mimicry of that most troubling image from that day.

Paranoia, terrorism, crowd mentality and conspiracy have been DeLillo's speciality since the Seventies; what better novelist, you might think, to sift through the competing narratives of 9/11? If fiction has to be written about it, who could do it better?

There's a swift answer to that. It's hard to describe quite how tiresomely issues-and-themes the majority of this novel is. Take that Falling Man, the performance artist of the title. Do you think he exemplifies the ambivalence of making artistic statements out of the materials of horror? There's one for the term paper. Or what about the Alzheimer's subplot, in which characters routinely find themselves "becoming desperate, separated from everything", no longer able to recognise the city they once knew so well? Discuss.

Even the most indiscriminate collector of resonant DeLillan conceits will have misgivings about this one. (Sample profundity: a husband masturbates his wife at the traffic lights, pedestrians gazing on, as she moans "It's a movie".) DeLillo also joins the - thankfully small - group of novelists compelled to try to imagine the last days of Muhammad Atta, the pilot of the first plane to hit the towers. This version isn't as thrillingly terrible as Martin Amis's riff on a similar theme, but it's threadbare and cursory compared with the chilling Oswald passages in Libra.

Then there's the dialogue. At some point since Underworld, and indeed for large stretches of that, DeLillo's characters started to speak like characters in a Don DeLillo novel, ie like no one else on earth. The effect is carried to extremes here, with almost every character disgorging stale profundities in what sounds like a comedy Mitteleuropean accent. "To feel dangerously alive, this was a quality you associated with your father," says Leanne's mother. "Wood and graphite. Materials from the earth. We respect this about a pencil," Leanne controversially informs her son. So it goes on.

Falling Man is a mean, cramped, irresolute novel. It's all the more astonishing because he's been so good on such things before: this is the writer who, in 1991, darkly anticipated the present glut of 9/11 fiction by having the protagonist of Mao II amiably explain to a friend: "What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous." This book attempts a tacit riposte to that sinister pronouncement, and it fails. Much more convincing, though, was a comment in an article DeLillo wrote for Harper's a month or two after September 11, which illustrated a problem no writer has satisfactorily dealt with in trying to shape meaning from that day: that from the very first moments, the disaster possessed its own image, became its own metaphor. "It sounded exactly like what it was," DeLillo wrote blankly then, "a tall tower collapsing."

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