Opening Line
The novel opens on a metaphorical image. New York, circa September 11, 2001. One of the Twin Towers has just fallen, but a survivor walks through a hellish scenario straight out of a horrific dystopian novel:
“It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night…The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now.”
The Psychological Aftermath
The book is an example of 9/11 literature, but one more concerned with what occurs after that date. How did being in the city, in the towers, not in the towers, nowhere near the towers, able to see the towers or just simply being aware of the towers coming down in a heap affect those who were there to see it or not see it or simply be near those who were there. The psychological aftereffects run deep and are like emotional aftershocks following an earthquake that rattles the seismic needle and lends the simplest acts the need for metaphor:
“He used to come home late, looking shiny and a little crazy. This was the period, not long before the separation, when he took the simplest question as a form of hostile interrogation.”
People
In the new world shaken upside-down by the flight of two planes into the glimmering spires of the old world order, everything becomes metaphor. Not just the acts of people or the sights of the city, but the people themselves. Stripped of the consciousness of individuality, the collective experience creates a need for renewal of sense which begins at the level of the individual and must be rebuilt upward:
“But she was not a contradiction, was she? She was not someone to be snatched at, not a denial of some truth he may have come upon in these long strange days and still nights, these after-days.”
Therapy
Survivor attend group counseling. Meetings held where they are encouraged to write down their thoughts and express the innermost, unvarnished truth containing all the fear and all the pain and the anger. One characterization is pure metaphor and rings truest:
“This is the devil. This is hell. All that fire and pain. Never mind God. This is hell.”
The Falling Man
In the lexicon of the attacks of 9/11, the Falling Man refers to the iconic image snapped of a body frozen in mid-flight through the air in an act of suicidal desperation. That man is not the real title figure of the novel, however. “The Falling Man” is a performance artist who replicates that act of the real-life, historical figure, but certainly not always to a welcoming audience:
“There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held.”
