It took Don DeLillo six years to deliver his long-awaited 9/11 book, but far from a sign of weakness, this slow gestation is in service of his point: traumatized and repressed, America is struggling to talk honestly and directly about 9/11. Fittingly, the drama in Falling Man surrounds a separated couple trying to find the words to reignite their love after the husband has a brush with death when the Towers fall. But DeLillo’s creepily quiet post-9/11 New York City is far from a city for lovers. The author richly evokes the numbed, anesthetized feeling virtually every American experienced in the days following 9/11, and his book becomes both a bracing portrait of those difficult, wayward times, and a critique of our collective response to the trauma. If DeLillo doesn't offer any easy answers, he does give us a necessary reminder of how important it is that we continue to look for them: Falling Man ends eerily with the 2002 Iraq War protests, a grim warning of the strange new world we all inherited after the attacks — and that history doesn't stop just because a powerful nation wants it to.