In 2012 Tom Junod wrote his third article for Esquire on Richard Drew's photograph of a man falling from the World Trade Center during the 2001 terrorist attacks. He concludes “Falling (Mad) Man” with this anecdote: “[a friend] told me that anyone I wanted to write about could be written about for a book called ‘The Falling Man’, because, in his words, ‘We're all falling men now.’”Footnote ¹ This is the expansive legacy of falling with which Aimee Pozorski has to contend in Falling after 9/11. In the first sustained exploration of what it means to refer to falling after the attacks, Pozorski argues that the perceived failure of artistic representations of falling after 9/11 stems not from the limitations of language but rather from its “excessive potential for references” (25). Language is slippery and malleable, Pozorski suggests, and the falling body is the ideal figure for illustrating the difficulty of reference when language offers an “explosion of possibilities” (37).

Falling after 9/11 certainly does attest to such an explosion, leaping from Paul de Man and Cathy Caruth to the figure of the falling man in Vietnam War narratives in the first two chapters. Pozorski begins by tracing a deconstructionist preoccupation with the falling body and its relationship with language, laying a solid foundation for the considerations that follow. One such consideration is how novels that contend with the aftermath of Vietnam show a “similar entanglement” of literal, figurative and moral falling to 9/11 literature (51). For Pozorski, this is a sure example of what de Man would call “a disjunctive plurality of meanings” (quoted at 29). What this analysis of “falling” before 2001 successfully instils in the reader is an awareness of how representations after 9/11 have been conditioned by long-standing theoretical and political concerns with falling.

In chapters 3, 4 and 6, Pozorski eagerly reevaluates key texts exhausted by frequent critical attention, namely Junod's first essay on Drew's photograph (2003), Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007). In her reading of the latter two works, there is an emphatic and long-overdue shift away from denigrating the authors for their failure to translate the trauma of the attacks into language. Instead, Pozorski argues that the creative language of the children in both novels indicates a way to navigate what she terms a crisis of excessive representation (98). In Falling Man, Justin and his friends mishear Bin Laden as Bill Lawton, which reminds the reader of the pliability of language: “evolving as it does to reflect the time, to incorporate misusages in order to account for the slipperiness of representation, and the effect of changes in interpretations over time” (98). Similarly, in Foer's novel, Oskar obsesses over inventions that could bring him closer to his father, and to an understanding of how he died, in particular the “flipbook” which reverses a man's fall and ends the novel. Pozorski disagrees with the criticism levelled at Foer's ending by arguing that Oskar's invention demonstrates an obsession with the “mechanics of history,” leaving him with the idea that if everything could be reversed, “We would have been safe” (143). For Pozorski, this is a historical impossibility represented by a grammatical possibility, the conditional mood, indicating another revealing slip in language (144).

Pozorski concludes the main body of her work with the statement that Oskar's flipbook of a man falling “up” to safety shows that “the image is in tension with the text” (143). Indeed, she labels Extremely Loud an “iconotext,” which in the definition of Lilliane Louvel (quoted at 127) is an attempt to achieve the “pluriform fusion” of text and image. The book would have benefited from Pozorski developing this schema throughout her argument in order to identify what actually happens when a text encounters an image. For example, Pozorski's discussion of Junod's “The “Falling (Mad) Man” could have been tightened by an intermedial approach to examine the (in)consistencies between Drew's photograph and Junod's words, to ask, how exactly is the photograph mediated by the text, and vice versa? What does it mean for the photograph for Junod to employ “the language of geometry” or “the literary language of the simile” (67)?

Nevertheless, Pozorski's work successfully proposes a way to reorient current critical opinion pertaining to post-9/11 literature by challenging the notion of “failure.” Falling after 9/11 offers a refreshing perspective for all scholars concerned with the state of American literature and culture following the destruction of the World Trade Center.