Surviving in the wreckage

FictionDon DeLillo's new novel is the finest literary achievement yet inspired by 9/11

They came on a clear, bright morning, the aeroplanes - the aircraft that crashed into the towers, changing America, changing everything, forever. The attack on the US marked the formal beginning of our enduring age of terrorism. All the horrors that had happened before that September day were suddenly reduced to a lurid overture. Now we exist within a marathon opera of fear and no one knows when the next act will begin.

The events of 9/11 have left a legacy of dread. They have become a horrible symbol and they continue to preoccupy American writers, many of whom have looked to the allegorical in creating a literature inspired by an act of violation. Melville's white whale has been supplanted by evil birds tearing through the skies to kill the innocent, and all in the name of God.

Earlier this week, Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize with The Road, a nightmare odyssey following a father and son across the devastated wasteland that was once America. It is a weighty, characteristically melodramatic narrative, predictably dark and heavy with apocalyptic intent.

Now a far greater response has been articulated by one of US fiction's most questing originals, Don DeLillo. Ever alert to the power of the image and the force of history - which he harnessed so effectively in Libra (1988) and Underworld (1997) - he has, with his chronicler's eye, confronted 9/11 and its aftermath, most specifically the surreal implosion on the lives of the survivors. There is no trickery, no gimmick, no easy sentimentality, no polemic.

Nor is it reportage or documentary masquerading as fiction; it is art as a prism reflecting impressions, sensations and recognition of the familiar when it has been challenged.

Falling Man is the finest literary achievement yet inspired by the terrorist attack, building considerably on John Updike's honourable contribution, Terrorist, an exploration of belief as the source of terrorism.

Richard Ford deliberately set his magnificent epic, The Lay of the Land, in the lead-up to 9/11. Paul Auster ended Brooklyn Follies in the minutes before the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days looked to the 9/11 aftermath with an allegorical zeal, while Jonathan Safran Foer's overrated Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ran headlong into the theme like a rampaging buffalo. Several of the stories in Deborah Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes shudder with an awareness of the menace.

It is DeLillo the visionary who has most authentically captured the mood. His layered and time-shifting narrative could also prove the defining achievement, as it is impossible to imagine anyone surpassing the simplicity, honesty and directness of this book.

There is also the breathtaking and deceptive beauty of the graceful prose. While McCarthy labours, hewing his language out of the dry desert landscape, DeLillo merges lyricism and the ordinary with a subtle ease. Florence, a survivor who finds hope when her briefcase is returned to her by a fellow survivor (Keith, who emerges as a central character), recalls how she became part of the human exodus out of one tower: "We just kept going down. Dark, light, dark again. I feel like I'm still on the stairs. I wanted my mother. If I live to be a hundred I'll still be on the stairs. It took so long it was almost normal in a way. We couldn't run so it wasn't some kind of running frenzy. We were stuck together . . ."

HAUNTING IMAGES SHIMMER through the pages. Moving out of direct speech, DeLillo takes up the woman's story: "They were moving out of the worst of the smoke now and this is when she saw the dog, a blind man and a guide dog, not far ahead, and it was like something out of the Bible, she thought. They seemed so calm."

The novel begins in the drama of a moment: "It was not a street any more but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night."

That opening sentence establishes the beauty of the prose that DeLillo conjures up throughout. Exactly why is this book so beautiful? I don't know. Should it be beautiful? I don't know. He has not written it as a lamentation; the sorrow is conveyed more as an eloquent shared regret. Here are individuals examining their respective lives and problems against the backdrop of something much bigger.

Controlled urgency sustains the work. "He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads . . . They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars."

It is as if a camera is tracing the passage of this initially unnamed man, dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase, as he walks through a war zone that has become completely silent. A woman gives him a bottle of water: "He closed his eyes and drank, feeling the water pass into his body taking dust and soot with it. She was looking at him. She said something he didn't hear and he handed back the bottle and picked up the briefcase . . . He started walking again."

It proves a vivid and brilliantly underwritten prelude to a novel that, sentence by sentence, builds into a masterpiece. It is DeLillo's best book since his remarkable study of displacement, The Names, appeared back in 1982. In many ways, he is the heir to the great William Gaddis, as is evident from works such as White Noise (1985) and Mao II (1991). DeLillo is also a highly visual writer, given to set pieces composed of unforgettable images. "Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments," begins The Body Artist (2001), "and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web." In Underworld, a baseball hefted into the sky during a ballgame in 1951 reverberates around the world and through time.

IN FALLING MAN, the characters are all watching, seeing, remembering. A new clarity is shaping their observations, their daily existence and their approaches to their respective histories. They are now living in a state of heightened alert.

Keith is the man carrying the briefcase, but it does not even belong to him. Survival has brought him back to the wife from whom he is separated. They have a child, and the wife, Liannne, a freelance editor, has a mother, an academic who is old and ill but still engaged at some level with a lover of some 20 years,

Each piece of information, every domestic and personal detail, is released gradually. DeLillo, now aged 71, has, line for line, never written better. The surreal grace of this convincing, cohesive novel will seduce as relentlessly as the narrative will compel. You can feel the tension experienced by people who are conscious of an invisible enemy. Lianne reckons the attack has shown that she and her husband are back together. It is not romantic; it is reality, it is life and death and duty.

She lives off the page and is one of the most convincing characters DeLillo, the writer's writer, has ever created. Weary of the loud Arabic music blasting from a neighbour's apartment, Lianne decides to confront the woman, and their bad-tempered exchange is but one of many wonderful set pieces. Earlier, Keith wonders about hailing a taxi but decides it may be difficult "at a time when every cab driver in New York was named Muhammad."

Suddenly, Lianne, her thoughts busy with half-remembered lines of verse and with memories of her father (who shot himself to avoid becoming a man who would not know who she was), notices a man "dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers . . . She had heard of him, a performance artist known as Falling Man . . . He brought it back, of course. Those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump."

THE IMAGE OF the artist, replicating the agonies of those who chose to die by jumping into free fall rather than burn to death, is powerful as an opportunistic memorial which offends. How could Falling Man inflict such a cruel reminder on the city?

Keith returns the briefcase to its owner, Florence, and strikes up a brief relationship with her. It is she who says: "Those men who did this thing. They're anti everything we stand for. But they believe in God."

Her bewilderment reflects the unreality of reality. DeLillo has written many fine books; he is an honest, wise and concerned writer. This testament of the moment, a moment, explains both the horror and the humanity in a profound work in which art and truth are majestically well-matched - and well-served.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Falling ManBy Don DeLillo Picador, 246pp. £16.99