Falling Man

Part 3 of Falling Man begins with another scene set on the streets of New York. In contrast to the opening of Part 1, when Keith wandered through the debris and the dust, the streets are now teeming with life. Half a million people march in an anti-war protest. Lianne and Justin attend and push their way through the busy crowds, hearing people shouting non sequiturs and accepting leaflets from political activists. The portrayal of the march has a subtle meaning in the context of American history. Three years after the September 11 attacks, many people marched against the war. Lianne and Justin join this march to protest American involvement in the war, joining their voices to hundreds of thousands of other people. However, the march changed nothing. The voices of the millions of protesters around the country were ignored. While the streets of New York may seem to have returned to something resembling normality, the people who inhabit these streets are further removed from agency. Since the attacks, they cannot control the world around them, which has spun out of their control. By including the march at the beginning of Part 3, the novel suggests that the characters’ attempts to reclaim agency and control over their lives—even when marching alongside hundreds of thousands of people trying to do the same—are ultimately futile. The march is an ineffective gesture, as the war continued for more than a decade.

For years, Lianne hosted a group therapy session where people with Alzheimer’s disease write and share their stories. She witnessed firsthand how these people’s memories began to fade before becoming lost to them. By cataloging the stories, Lianne felt as though she was fighting back against the slow demise of her patients’ memories, allowing her to use her organizational skills to cling to thoughts, memories, and lives that might otherwise be lost forever. In Part 3, Lianne’s therapy sessions have ended, but her association with dementia has not. She takes a series of tests designed to see whether she might suffer from similar problems in the future, and her tests come back with positive news. The doctors describe her as unremarkable, and Lianne finds this a huge relief. Not only does she receive the positive news that she will not suffer the same fate as the patients or her father, but she also takes a subtler meaning from the doctor’s words. Being told that she is unremarkable functions as a blessing of normality for a woman whose life has been upended in recent years. Following the terrorist attack and her mother’s death, Lianne certainly does not feel that her life has been proceeding normally. However, when she receives the diagnosis, she takes it to mean that her future will be conventional, unremarkable, and normal. She craves safety and normality, so the doctor’s diagnosis carries more weight than the doctor could ever predict.

Three years after the attacks, Keith is increasingly involved in the professional poker scene. He stops working as a lawyer and plays poker full time, spending most of the week in Las Vegas and returning intermittently to see Lianne and Justin. Keith becomes lost in the world of professional poker for two reasons. Firstly, the game of poker is an established system with set rules. Keith knows these rules, so playing poker gives him a sense of control in his life that has been lacking since the attacks. Secondly, being in Las Vegas allows Keith to redefine his identity. After so many years in New York and so long working in and living near the World Trade Center, the events of September 11 left Keith feeling as though he was no longer his old self. He does not enjoy being reminded of the disassociation from his past, feeling the trauma of his fractured identity whenever he is physically close to the ruins of the towers. Instead, he spends more time in Las Vegas. The anonymous hotel rooms demand no emotional investment from the guests. The casinos work hard to hide the outside world from the players, locking them inside a self-contained bubble that isolates them from everything outside. Keith appreciates being cut off inside this bubble as it allows him to hide from his traumatic past. Keith can ameliorate his identity crisis by physically removing himself from a location that once defined him and thrusting himself into a game that indulges his need for control. Unfortunately for his family, however, he cannot do this at home.