Falling man
The “Falling man” follows Keith, a few-and-thirty-year-old New Yorker who works in a real estate company in the World Trade Center. He also works in the World Trade Center when the attack happens the 11th September - but he is lucky and gets out of the first tower before it collapses. Hurt and confused he goes home to Lianne, Keith’s exwife and wants to get back together with her. They resume their in disjointed fragments, a form of cohabitation. The novel is, especially in a non-US context, an interesting description and interpretation of what the terrorist attacks meant for the New Yorker’s self-understanding. The terrorist attack splits, like the kind of catastrophic events tend to make the world into a before and an after.
“It was no longer a street, but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. (...) The roar was still in the air, the fall along curved rumbling. This was the world now. ..”
The downfall, the catastrophic dust chaos, is in the novel structure also a new beginning, and Keith's appearance in Liannes doorway is a violent return from the dead:
"When he stood in the doorway, it was not possible, a man come out of an ash storm, nothing but blood and slag, which stank of something burnt, with pinpoint glimpses of shattered glass in his face."
Keith's return after the terrorist attacks becomes a crucial event that puts the protagonists' lives upside down. But unlike the traditional magazine layout of such experiences where they bring those involved back to some original and traditional family values with cooperation and presence, Keith disaster experience affects him in an equally destructive way. Although he returns to Lianne and has a lot of time to be with their son, Justin. Sadly, the experience also makes him unable to maintain human relationships, and the only place he is present is at the poker table.
The novel's