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As A Good and Happy Child opens, narrator George Davies is seeking relief for his chronic anxiety and alienation through psychoanalysis. His marriage is falling apart, and his effectiveness as a father to his newborn son is threatened. George believes that the solutions to his problems can be discovered in a careful re-examination of his past, but he must be ready for what comes of recalling things that have been locked away for more than 20 years.

It was at a crucial point in George’s childhood immediately following his father’s death that the problems seem to have begun. After seeing a spectral, doppelganger-like figure when he was 11 years old, George began his descent into an existence dominated by what seemed to be visual and auditory hallucinations. Several of his father’s friends possessed a flair for spiritualism, and George gradually came to believe that his affliction was identical to what had apparently affected his (possibly murdered?) father. Grieving for a dead father like a young Hamlet, the young George moves through a frightening world complicated by madness, spirituality and tragedy.

In this chilling tale, Justin Evans adroitly manages a compelling narrative style, complex plot and intriguing characters. His debut successfully hovers between the sublime terrors of Dostoyevsky and the melodramatic extravagance of The Exorcist.

Dominating the cover photograph of Don DeLillo’s monumental 1997 novel Underworld are the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, their upper floors obscured by fog or smoke. That picture eerily prefigures the subject matter of this latest work, marking a welcome return to form for an American master. In Falling Man, DeLillo creates a cast of fully human characters groping for some understanding of the act of madness that was 9/11.

Keith Neudecker is a survivor of the attack on the World Trade Center, struggling through dust and ash as the novel opens, toward the midtown apartment where his wife Lianne, from whom he’s separated, and his seven-year old son, Justin, live. He carries the briefcase of a stranger with whom he’ll later connect as he attempts to deal with the random chance that allowed him to escape the doomed building while friends and co-workers died. Lianne is a freelance book editor who volunteers to lead a group of people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease through writing exercises designed to help them hold on to the shreds of memory slowly drifting away. She’s haunted by the suicide of her father, himself a victim of the terrible disease, and fears his death foreshadows her fate.

Without overtly acknowledging their shared need, Lianne and Keith negotiate an uneasy reconciliation that’s more a matter of circumstance than rekindled passion. Justin and two of his friends search the skies, looking for planes flown by the man they call Bill Lawton. They and the other characters, like Lianne’s mother Nina; her companion Martin, an art dealer with vague ties to German leftists; and Florence Givens, the owner of the briefcase, wander across a New York landscape that feels scrubbed of most of its familiar landmarks and haunted by the memory of that grim day. DeLillo brings even more impressive imaginative powers to bear as he depicts the terror cell preparing to launch the attacks.

The Falling Man of the title is a performance artist who appears randomly throughout the city, using a harness to recreate what appears to some to be the iconic photograph of a man plunging to his death from one of the towers. We’re forced to ask ourselves whether this enigmatic character is a symbol of healing or merely an exploiter of the city’s grief.

As in all his novels, DeLillo grapples with profound questions the existence of God, the power of memory, the struggle we confront to find our place in the universe. His prose is poetic and meditative, shifting effortlessly from jittery, almost jazzlike rhythms to the placid quality of a hymn. One example, from his description of the towers’ collapse that bookends the novel: The only light was vestigial now, the light of what comes after, carried in the residue of smashed matter, in the ash ruins of what was various and human, hovering in the air above. The subject of 9/11 and its impact on the American psyche offer themes that will resurface in literature for generations. Those books will have the luxury of time and emotional distance to permit their authors to wrestle with questions that will linger throughout history. Still, it’s doubtful that many of them will do so with the grace and undeniable power of this exquisite work. Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

New York City is never merely a setting in Pete Hamill’s novels. It is a pulsing, protean entity, both event and catalyst, and he reserves for it the reverence of a man describing a lifetime love affair. It was the backdrop, most notably, for the studiously ambitious Forever, and for his wondrous memoir, A Drinking Life. So it is no surprise that Hamill’s city, specifically the area on the West Side just south of the demarcating 14th Street, is the stomping ground for North River, his latest paean to his home turf. North River is the story of Dr. James Delaney, a middle-aged Depression-era sawbones who pays house calls to gangsters and grandees alike without favor. Scarred by the war, the disappearance of his wife and the absence of his headstrong daughter, Delaney lives only for his patients. At least until his daughter abandons her 3-year-old son inside Delaney’s door one day when he is out. The boy, named Carlos called Carlito spurs emotions long since forgotten. Slowly, the doctor puts his luckless past behind him and begins to live again. Still, it isn’t all clear sailing. Delaney winds up in the middle of a deadly gang war. Also, the gnawing fear that his daughter will return and take away his beloved grandson is always at the back of his mind. But despite it all, the reader never actually fears something bad will happen. Hamill clearly loves his creations too much to do them harm.

For those afraid Hamill has taken geographical liberties trust me, there is no river just north of the West Village you can rest easy. It’s just the author playing the pedagogue. The North River is the original Dutch name for the Hudson River, the city’s western boundary. North River is like comfort food. You won’t find many surprises. The characters stay within the narrow confines that Hamill has laid for them like grids of the uptown streets he avoids. But reading North River is like you would imagine a crosstown walk with Hamill to be even though you know exactly where you’re going, it’s still a fun trip. Ian Schwartz recently moved from New York City to San Diego.