In June of 2007, Andrew O'Hagan reviewed DeLillo's novel Falling Man for the New York Review of Books. The first half of O'Hagan's review contextualizes Falling Man better than any other that I've read. In short, he takes us through Players, White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld, and The Body Artist in order to show us that DeLillo -- with his discussions of plots, death, terrorism, and the World Trade Center -- had been leading us up to that "day of days" for a long time. As O'Hagan writes,
To have something exist as your subject before it happens is not unprecedented in the world of literature [...] but the meeting of September 11 and Don DeLillo is not so very much a conjunction as a point of arrival [...]
The second half of his review, however, takes a turn. O'Hagan writes that this connection between DeLillo and 9/11 is too strong, so that when the day actually comes, it "instantly blows DeLillo's lamp out." O'Hagan then builds on this point:
DeLillo the novelist prepared us for September 11, but he did not prepare himself for how such an episode might, in the way of denouements, instantly fly beyond the reach of his own powers. In a moment, the reality of the occasion seems to have burst the ripeness of his style, and he truly struggles in this book to say anything that doesn’t sound in a small way like a warning that comes too late. Reading Falling Man, one feels that September 11 is an event that is suddenly far ahead of him, far beyond what he knows, and so an air of tentative rehearsal resounds in an empty hall.
Although I respect O'Hagan's review, particularly the first half, I am not inclined to side with him and his dismissal of Falling Man. (In fact, I would like to spend a future blog post showing how DeLillo does succeed in this novel.) O'Hagan's review, like many that I've read, appears to argue for DeLillo's post-9/11 irrelevance. With the power of hindsight, one can reliably say that Point Omega has disproved this flimsy generalization about DeLillo.
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