The emotional and physical damage from the destruction of the World Trade Center by terrorists cut a wound in the American psyche that is far from healed.

Investigations continue at Ground Zero, survivors report lingering symptoms and families still struggle with their grief.

Some novelists have tried with mixed results to distill the mammoth event into words. Jay McInerney made a feeble stab with "The Good Life," while Jonathan Safran Foer fared better with "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close."

		"FALLING MAN" By Don DeLillo Scribner ($26)

Now, a writer with more impressive works than those two takes on the deeply felt tragedy by focusing on a New York family changed by Sept. 11.

Since his tour de force, "Underworld," in 1997, Don DeLillo claimed a place as one of the country's prime novelists, a writer with much to say about America's history. It seemed only right that he would choose this pivotal moment for fictional exploration.

"Underworld" charted a 40-year course for the Cold War's impact on American attitudes and behavior. The impact of Sept. 11 on the nation's future is still evolving.

DeLillo's challenge, then, is to resist considering "The Big Question," yet unanswered, of the assault's meaning, and focus on the small, mundane details of daily living in a changed world.

He succeeds, perhaps too well. In the key characters of Keith and Lianne, an estranged couple reunited after he survives the WTC catastrophe, DeLillo demands that we keep an accounting of their scattered emotional lives in a fictional world that he breaks into shards, then expects us to piece together.

Since the lengthy "Underworld," DeLillo has been reducing his writing like a cook simmering down a sauce, an experiment of concentration in such plays as "Valparaiso" and a novella, "The Body Artist."

Well executed, the flavors are intense and interesting. If missing a key ingredient, this literary reduction will lack complexity.

Like an impressive spice collection, "Falling Man" has many elements to choose from the Sept. 11 drama. DeLillo's choices, though, produce a sharp, bitter aftertaste rather than a fulsome, satisfying meal.

In the aftermath, Keith, Lianne and son Justin, 8, live together, yet apart. The boy and his friends search the sky with binoculars for more planes but keep it secret.

Keith has a short affair with another WTC survivor. The experience is the only thing they can share, but the recalled pain is too strong to endure.

Lianne finds little comfort with her ailing mother and her lover and her volunteer work with Alzheimer patients. Forgetting rather than remembering begins to look like a good coping strategy.

Another person appears in brief, intense episodes; a terrorist from Iraq named Hommad who was among the hijackers of the first jet to hit the WTC. He seems to sleepwalk through the days of preparation, then waits stoically for the impact.

In his efforts to condense the experience of Sept. 11, DeLillo shortchanges this mysterious figure.

The title character is a performance artist who haunted Manhattan with his version of a Sept. 11 victim photographed falling from the towers. Using a safety harness, he would jump from elevations around the city in the weeks after the attacks.

Lianne watches one of his jumps: "He keels forward, body rigid, and falls full length, head first, drawing a rustle of awe. ... But the fall was not the worst of it. The jolting end of the fall left him upside down, secured to the harness, twenty feet above the pavement. The jolt, the sort of midair impact and bounce, the recoil and now the stillness, arms at his sides, one leg bent at the knee."

Sept. 11 was a "jolting end" itself to the nation's sense of security and invincibility. In re-creating that instant in the lives of people close to it, DeLillo continues to work out his vision of America as a place of estrangement, isolation and unsatisfied desire.

The word from this novelist is that the shock waves of Sept. 11 have only made life harder. As Keith walks away from the burning tower, the book ends in an image of surrender:

"Then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life."