that Woolf also wrote into To the
Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway and The
Waves. One assumes that Christensen
won’t be writing several more books about
Oscar Feldman, the man of the title, who
resembles no one so much as an oddly
idealized vision of a Picasso-esque male
abstract expressionist, all sex and brio with
no feel for consequences. He’s all about
virility, obsessed with painting only female
nudes and screwing a variety of different
women — not that we ever hear Oscar’s
inner life from himself. He’s also not there.
Through a postmodern textual wrinkle, the
book opens with his (fictional) Times obit.
From there, the narrative dives into the
interactions of two Oscar Feldman biogra-
phers with the three main women in his
life: his wife Abigail, his mistress Teddy
and his sister Maxine, also a painter.
But Christensen’s intent isn’t really to
build an image of Oscar; instead, she
shows the lives of the three elderly
women and their different, rarely overlap-
ping New York worlds. Abigail, consis-
tently providing care for their middle-
aged autistic son, recalls Oscar in a much
more gentle fashion than Teddy, who is
the mother of two adult women, also
Oscar’s children. Teddy’s best friend Lila
enters into the narration as well, her
reflections on Teddy and Oscar giving
heft to the self-interested accounts of
the other women and also shining a light
on some of Oscar’s irresponsible behav-
ior, which left Teddy in poverty. And
Maxine — she’s what’s often known as a
battle-axe, a formidable character whose
heart the reader gets to see. She always
yearns after those she can’t quite have
and finds, so late in life, that her art may
finally eclipse that of her brother.
Christensen deals with the erotic and
internal lives of the middle-aged and eld-
erly with a kind of thoughtful yet humor-
ous detail that comes home most strong-
ly in the differences among the meals
these women serve to the biographers.
That’s literal, of course, but also figura-
tive: Abigail deals handily with one of
them, serving him a tempting trade that
essentially destroys his integrity. The
Great Man ends with fictional book
reviews of the two biographies, and read-
ers see that the male writers concentrat-
ing on the “great man” have lost their
chance to write about the great women
he knew. Thankfully, for that we have
Christensen. — Suzi Steffen
main character though Lynn Mason gets a
middle segment that’s quite different from
the group narrative. The ongoing question
of whether she has cancer gives her col-
leagues a focus, a way to worry about
something outside themselves and their
job, as does the firing of Tom Mota, whose
inability to sustain a persona that will fit in
with the office groupthink leads him to
wear three company polos at once and
email impassioned missives to the entire
company late at night. What happens to
those who get fired and can’t leave their
office self behind, or to those still working in
this shrinking, nervous community, is end-
lessly funny and surprisingly touching,
especially as Ferris brings it all together at
the end. — Molly Templeton
Little Lives of Greatness
FALLING MAN by Don Delillo. SCRIBNER, 2007.
HARDCOVER, $26. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2007.
Dot-Com, or Bust
THEN WE CAME TO THE END by
Joshua Ferris. LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY, 2007. HARDCOVER,
$23.99. FINALIST, 2007 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION. A
NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2007.
The story of a group of coworkers at a
rapidly shrinking advertising agency —when
someone gets fired, as keeps happening,
they get “walked Spanish down the hall,” a
complicated and perfectly explained bit of
office in-jokery — Joshua Ferris’ debut
novel, Then We Came to the End, is auda-
cious, observant, funny, sympathetic and,
above all, inclusive. His choice of voice —
first-person plural — includes everyone in
the office (as well as the reader) in its wry,
dry, storytelling tone. On the one hand, it’s
very specific, as former ad agency employ-
ee Ferris details the work, the putting off of
the work, the ways to spend time and waste
time and perhaps, at some point, actually do
some work; on the other, the peculiarities of
office life are depicted in such a way that
they become universal. Life at work, be that
work in an office, a warehouse or a book-
store, is its own culture, with its own hierar-
chies and rules and sense of humor, and it’s
that culture that Ferris both relishes in and
skewers with this book. There is no single
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Saying
that
now, six years
later, 9/11 lingers
in our public con-
sciousness is a
gross understate-
ment. While the
media
frenzy
inevitably dulled
over time, we’re
still saturated with
the imagery and
iconography of that day, not to mention
the frequent reminders from the likes of
Bush, Cheney and Giuliani. “9/11 litera-
ture” can almost justify its own section at
the bookstore. So when Delillo approach-
es the subject, even head on as he does,
it’s more than impressive that his efforts
don’t come off as tired or stale. In fact,
Falling Man does what I thought impossi-
ble — it made September 11 real again,
not just a dull wash of 24-hour cable news
and American flag decals.
The title refers to a New York perform-
ance artist who dangles above passersby
in business attire and a pose that imitates
the famous photo by Richard Drew. Like
Delillo, the Falling Man — to better or
worse effect — attempts to approach the
tragedy by jarring us out of a haze fed by
television reports and political posturing.
The book opens in the immediate
aftermath and introduces us to Keith, a
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interactions — and often lack of interac-
tions — with his family, fellow lower
Manhattanites and ex-poker buddies, we
begin to understand the difficulty of
resigning oneself with nothing short of
catastrophe.
As Keith eventually becomes singular-
ly concerned with distancing himself from
the event, we are introduced to another
thread in which Hammad, one of the
hijackers of Flight 11, becomes singularly
obsessed with his own apparent destiny.
“We are ready to sink into our little lives,”
Keith says — this seems to be a mantra
throughout the work.
While the usual Delillo detractors —
those who view his characters as empty
vessels for the author’s own ideas — will
likely not be appeased, Falling Man con-
tinues to make an argument that Delillo is,
sentence for sentence, the best novelist in
America. — Tony Perez
Love, Actually
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME by André
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YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2007.
Bookslut.com says, “The hardest part
of writing a review for André Aciman’s
powerful first novel, Call Me By Your
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