John Dugdale
ART AND TERROR
Falling Man
By Don DeLillo (Picador 246pp £16.99)

Leaving aside out-and-out thrillers, the corpus of 9/11-related fiction to date is roughly as follows. Frederic Beigbeder depicted a man and his sons in the Twin Towers on the morning of the attacks (Windows on the World), Jonathan Safran Foer a precocious kid who lost his father when the towers were destroyed (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). Claire Messud showed a group of Manhattanites with media or arty jobs before and after September 11, 2001 (The Emperor's Children), Jay McInerney a super-affluent set picking up the pieces of their old lives in the aftermath (The Good Life). John Updike created an imaginary, post-9/11 Islamist suicide bomber in New Jersey (Terrorist), while Martin Amis got inside the head of a real 9/11 hijacker (The Last Days of Mohammed Atta). Ian McEwan, in Saturday, portrayed a good man adjusting to the disorienting new Age of Terror which the attacks inaugurated.

Although the relative lateness of his contribution is bound to induce a certain amount of yawning, Don DeLillo starts with several advantages over other 9/11 authors. He grew up in New York - in the Bronx, as depicted in the childhood scenes in Underworld - and regularly sets fiction there. He has already handled historical events, in the Kennedy assassination novel Libra, and tackled terrorism - via the kidnapping of a Swiss writer in Beirut - in Mao II.

It was also Mao II in which he became the first author (Conrad excepted) to identify the challenge the phenomenon poses for literature: Bill Gray, the reclusive novelist who is its central figure, argues that the 'raids on consciousness' that change cultures now come from terrorists, making fiction redundant. Art and Terror are arch-rivals, one the supreme expression of individualism, the other its nemesis.

His new novel opens with Keith, a man in his late thirties, emerging from the Twin Towers on September 11 with only minor injuries; in his dazed condition, he turns up on the doorstep of Lianne, his estranged wife, and she agrees he can live with her and their son Justin indefinitely while he recovers. Their relationship is now free of the friction that led to the separation; but Keith nevertheless begins an affair with Florence, a fellow-worker at the World Trade Center whom he meets when he returns a briefcase to her, having absent-mindedly retained it when it was passed down a staircase crowded with people waiting to leave the burning towers. We also meet Lianne's mother Nina, a now-frail former college lecturer; Nina's lover Martin, an art dealer who spends much of his time in Europe; Alzheimer's patients for whom Lianne, a freelance book editor, organises story-telling sessions; and the other men who take part in Keith's weekly poker game.

Two outsider figures pop up regularly. The eponymous Falling Man is a performance artist who stages falls in public, wearing a safety harness beneath his suit; a routine undoubtedly intended to remind those watching of images of men falling or jumping from the Twin Towers. And each of the novel's three parts ends with a short section devoted to a falling (or fallen) man: Hammad, a hijacker first seen as part of an Islamist cell in Hamburg, then in the US preparing for his mission, and finally heading towards Manhattan in a hijacked plane.

As in McInerney's novel, the towers' destruction provides an apocalyptic backdrop for what is essentially a tale of middle-aged infidelity and marriage break-up. The tragedy at once robs Keith of his corporate job and downtown apartment, pushing him back to Lianne, and introduces him to Florence, pulling the couple apart again; but you feel more conventional crises, such as sudden bereavement or diagnosis of fatal illness, could have had the same effect. There's little specific engagement with 9/11, despite Hammad's rather detachable presence, and none of Mao II's philosophising about terror.

Falling Man's core plot is very simple: Lianne hopes she and Keith can be a family again, and initially that seems possible; but gradually he drifts away from her, first magnetised by Florence and then - deserting her too - by gambling. Yet the plethora of secondary storylines makes it a fragmented and sometimes bewildering experience. Whether DeLillo is writing about poker, or Alzheimer's sufferers, or Nina's paintings or Justin's friends, the individual sections are vivid enough; but they seem to be pieces from different jigsaws.

Perhaps aware of the problem, he uses two devices in the closing pages that are meant to wrap everything up neatly. As in Underworld, the narrative returns full circle to where it started, in this case the morning of the attacks; and in the final paragraphs (in a segue almost certainly borrowed from Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow) Hammad on the hijacked plane suddenly metamorphoses into Keith in the soon-to-be-destroyed towers. Nothing before this has intimated how terrorist and terror-survivor are linked, however. It's an assertion of relatedness, not a real connection; a vain, last-minute attempt to give cohesion to a frustratingly disjointed novel.