ASSOCIATED PRESS photographer Richard Drew took the picture at 9.41am, Eastern Standard Time, September 11, 2001. The image was on the agency's server within hours for international media download. A man in freefall, escaping the North Tower inferno, headfirst and vertical, arms locked at his sides, left leg flexed at the knee. Unimaginable: the defiant or desperate grace of a human missile aimed earthwards at 150mph from the 107th floor. Unidentified: the Falling Man.

InDonDeLillo'snovelthedisturbing photograph is recreated as street theatre by a performance artist called David Janiak who uses a harness to dangle upside-down from New York public buildings. He adopts the identical pose, straight arms and bent left leg, to become a falling angel or the hanging man from the Tarot pack. His street performances are met with the same furious indignation that saw many condemn the newspaper publication of the original PA photograph. Janiak is beaten up several times. He is regularly arrested and charged with "creating a hazardous or physically offensive condition" above the streets of the city.

The motive behind these performances is unexplained. Janiak, like DeLillo in real life, refuses to give interviews or addresspublicforums.Apaneldiscussion debates whether Janiak is a "heartless exhibitionist" or a "brave new chronicler of the ageofterror".Thesequestionscould equallybeaskedofDeLillo,whohas repeately returned to the theme of terrorism in his fiction. His 1977 novel, Players, imagined a terrorist attack on the New York Stock Exchange. White Noise foreshadowed bioterrorism with an "airborne toxic event" which forces the evacuation of a US city. In Mao II, the terrorist replaces the novelist in impacting on global consciousness.

Coincidences have been perceived as eerie prophecies, adding to DeLillo's notoriety as the Nostradamus of contemporary fiction. The book jacket of Underworld - published in 1997 - featured a photograph of the Twin Towers with a white bird flying towardsthemonoutstretchedwings. "DeLillosuddenlyfillsthesky,"wrote Martin Amis ominously, acclaiming the novel as a masterpiece in his New York TimesBookReview.Butsince2001the critical lynch mob has been out for DeLillo. He has been accused of "bad citizenship".

The Falling Man motif in his new novel represents a gesture of dissent, a new racket to disturb the peace. The original PA photograph became an American taboo, self-censored out of newspapers. A nation of habitual TV voyeurs condemned the picture as a denial of the privacy and dignity of a man falling to his death (an estimated 250 victims of the Twin Towers jumped). The Janiak character in the novel protests the hypocrisy by reimposing a suppressed image on public awareness.

It would be pleasant to applaud the novelfordisplayingthesamecourage,but DeLillo's artistic vigour appears to be in decline as he struggles to maintaincoherence.SinceUnderworld, this is the third DeLillo novel that has fractured into bleak minimalism. Like random screenplay shards for an unfilmable movie, it is vague, virtually plotless and often downright boring.

The trials of Janiak are merely an incidental strand that recurs in each of the three sections of the book. The main storyline focuses on a 39-year-old lawyer who survives the attack. His escape is described in detail: clambering out of his wrecked office, a dying colleague slumped under a desk, the march in file down the stairwell, staggeringthroughstreetsfilledwith smoke, powder, panic and confusion. He turns up on the doorstep of his estranged wife. The novel attempts to deal with what the blurb calls the "reconfigured emotional landscape" of this family - husband, freelance editor wife and seven-year-old son - precariouslyreunitedbutindividually traumatised by the tragedy.

"There's an empty space where America used to be," is the verdict of one character. The lawyer declines into narcolepsy, eyes open, mind shut down on dead space, fingers reaching for the gambling chips he unconsciously rebuilds as Twin Tower stacks in the poker games which become his substitute for living. His wife fears sensory collapse and memory loss, adopts mental exercises of counting backwards as some kind of retrogenesis therapy and seeks the comfort of sitting in church: "It seemed to her that they were falling out of the world."

The embarrassment is over a writer of DeLillo's stature resorting to such trite and flabby resolutions of his material. Far from presenting any "inner seam of history", as the publicity material claims, Falling Man could as well be the unexceptional story of a family in crisis after a redundancy, a car accident or the death of a pet.

Worse is the set of codas to each of the three parts of the novel, where we join the terrorists preparing their attack on the Twin Towers, first in Hamburg, later during flying school instruction and finally in the countdown to impact. This is not so much tasteless as miserably executed, like chapters from the thriller Jeffrey Archer has already created from the same source material. How could DeLillo have been reduced to this?