DON DELILLO'S "FALLING MAN" AND THE AGE OF TERROR

Don DeLillo, Underworld After the apocalyptic millennial scenarios that went by the name Y2K fizzled, Americans felt secure in their leadership of the New World Order; but when the towers fell, so did confidence in our global preeminence, revealing the twenty-first century as an age of terror and retribution. Cosmopolis, which was very near completion on September 11, 2001, chronicles a single day in April 2000 on which the rapaciousness that supported hypercapitalism, personified by the currency speculator Eric Packer, is confronted by a troop of black flag anarchists at the NA SDAQ Center and a lone assassin who resembles an amalgam of Leon Czolgosz (the anarchist who shot President William McKinley in 1901), Lee Harvey Oswald, and John Hinckley, Jr.1 Faced with the enormity of the attack on the World Trade Center in the city of his birth, DeLillo set aside his novel for some two months in order to write an essay, In the Ruins of the Future: