"Falling Man" by Don DeLillo; Scribner; 246 pages; $26.

It's uncanny now to look back at the dust jacket for Don DeLillo's novel, "Underworld," written four years before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. The Twin Towers rise up into the mist, with a church silhouetted in the foreground. A bird, now looking unmistakably like an airplane, seems to target the tower on the right.

It's not the only time DeLillo's work has seemed to foreshadow Sept. 11. A character in "Mao II," written in 1991, argues that terrorists have become more important than novelists in shaping the new world. "The major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings," DeLillo writes. "This is the new tragic narrative."

It seems fitting then that DeLillo, a native New Yorker, should address the defining moment of American life six years after 9/11. His 14th novel, "Falling Man," begins and ends with terror, midair explosions and crumbled buildings. There have been many other Sept. 11 novels, but no other American writer seems as equipped to tell the story.

In a brilliant opening passage, DeLillo captures in about three pages the moment after the towers fell. "The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall." Sirens sound, people run through the rubble with handkerchiefs over their mouths. "This was the world now."

His main character, Keith Neudecker, works in the World Trade Center and escaped just before the collapse. We meet him walking through the streets of Manhattan, wearing a suit, carrying a briefcase, covered in ash with pieces of glass stuck in his hair and face.

This ghost of a man shows up at his estranged wife's home, and it's through this one broken family — a husband, a wife and their child — that DeLillo traces the wreckage of Sept. 11.

The jagged story accumulates through a series of vignettes in the days and weeks after the attacks. Back with his family, Keith seems estranged from himself, "like a humanoid robot," trapped in a string of compulsive behaviors: competitive poker, wrist rehab exercises, an inexplicable affair with a woman who also survived the attacks.

There is also the famous DeLillo dialogue: oblique, stylized and funny, pointing more to the distances between people than to any conversational reality. They talk like characters in a Samuel Becket play. It can be off-putting to some readers, but in this novel, it works to convey the strange distances, the broken spaces.

The book memorializes and recreates the attacks in a way journalism and nonfiction can't touch.

But the flaws of this slim work are almost to be expected. The aftermath of 9/11 fits too neatly into the Big Ideas that DeLillo has about American society and culture. Keith is the perfect DeLillo Man, alienated from work, family and himself, conditioned by the faceless mass culture.