DeLillo Returns

Lots of good advance buzz about Don DeLillo's new novel, Falling Man. The man who drew memorable connections between the terrorist and the writer in Mao II and whose last two volumes -- The Body Artist and Cosmopolis -- were subpar, has now come up with a 9/11 novel that, in the breathless words of Kirkus Reviews, "is arguably the crowning work of DeLillo's estimable career: a compassionate and despairing dramatization of current events that shows how inextricably the political and the personal worlds are fatefully entwined." If this New Yorker extract is anything to go by, it's a welcome return to form.