In his latest slim novel, “The Silence” (Scribner), DeLillo attacks technology and it’s domination over every aspect of our existence. The story begins in the near future of February 2022 on a transatlantic flight from Paris to New York. Jim Kripps, a claims adjuster, and his poet partner, Tessa Berens, are returning from a post-COVID vacation to Paris. Jim’s attention is glued to the overhead itinerary map when the plane loses power on its descent into Newark Airport. A crash landing sends Jim to the hospital with a minor head injury, and then the two proceed to uptown Manhattan to join their friends for a Super Bowl party.
Meanwhile, in Manhattan, Max Stenner and his wife Diane Lucas are awaiting Jim and Tessa’s arrival. One guest, Martin Dekker, a bookish physics teacher at a Bronx charter school has already arrived. Martin is a former college student of Diane’s, who is obsessed with Einstein. Max has “big dollars” riding on the Titan-Seahawks game, and is enthralled by the “commercials, stations breaks and pregame babble” on his big screen television.
Then, as DeLillo states “something happened.” At kickoff, the images shake and dissolve into abstract patterns and the screen goes black. The void extends beyond the screen to phones, laptops, and the electrical grid. As the massive power outage interrupts the Super Bowl, our characters’ world descends into silence. Various conspiracy theories are bantered about (a Con Ed mistake, sabotage, an alien invasion), and when Jim and Tessa finally arrive they are just coming to terms with their near-death experience.
Although “The Silence” was written just prior to the current pandemic, the novel is relevant to our present circumstances. We neither understand COVID-19 and it’s present impact upon society any more than Max, Diane, Martin, Jim and Tessa can understand the blackout. Nor can we speculate how it will affect our future. However, DeLillo is hopeful. When questioned about the long term affect of the pandemic during a recent New York Times interview, he responded “We may feel enormous relief, but for many people, it’s going to be difficult to return to what we might term as ordinary...Those ordinary things are going to seem extraordinary.”
Don DeLillo doesn’t write genre fiction, or stories that make the reader feel good. He writes because he has something prophetic to express about culture and our lives. Or about terrorism, financial collapse, or nuclear and biochemical disaster. He writes to make us think so hard that our brains hurt. At the age of 83, and over seventeen novels, DeLillo has summoned the darker currents of our American experience. In “The Silence,” he warns about “the dependence of the mass on energy,” and if readers wise, they’ll heed his oracle to prevent what he terms may be “World War III.”

There is something quixotic about what DeLillo has done: writing about contemporary culture even as it collapses into subcultures, and even as the democratic dream of a collective center is derided as suspicious in identitarian terms. He has succeeded, by my estimation, chiefly by treating the topical not as a bid for relevance but as a yearning for commonality, mutuality, something to share. The news, for DeLillo, is the last culture that all of us share, and not the news as a set of agreed-upon facts, but as a disaggregated and constantly refreshable cache of sensation to be interrogated, debated and then forgotten.... A writer of the present is almost always an apocalypst, and it’s the privilege of every generation to think itself the last, though the generations that wrote after the Bomb had a better justification for their panic.... What began as dialogue, gathered energy as trialogue, and peaked as pentalogue, soon topples like a Babel tower and disperses into monologues of unconsoled dissociation: five separate “friends” unable to communicate, unable to connect, unable even to remember, nattering to themselves like lunatics, haunting the hallways, counting the stairs.

It turns out that the distance between “Can you hear me now?” and “What’s left to live for?” is about seven minutes. Deprived of television and Internet access in this rapidly cooling apartment, Diane and her former student devolve into a bizarre series of non sequiturs about Jesus and Einstein. Diane thinks Martin “sounds either brilliant or unbalanced.” But that is not a tough choice. Martin starts rambling off a list of words: thaumatology, ontology, eschatology, epistemology, phenomenology, teleology, etiology, ontogeny. “He could not stop himself,” the narrator notes. Then he drops his pants, and Diane asks him to say something in German.... After “The Road,” “Oryx and Crake,” “Station Eleven” and other unnerving dystopias, “The Silence” feels like Apocalypse Lite for people who don’t want to get their hands dirty.... As the hours tick by, these characters swing erratically from domestic banality to absurdist spectacle. Never have five people reacted with such existential dread to missing the Super Bowl. If they’d run out of guacamole, they might have jumped out the window.

A much-honored master renowned for his prescience and attunement to the zeitgeist’s deepest vibrations, DeLillo (Zero K, 2016) says that he began writing this taut novel “long before the current pandemic.” As virus-imperiled readers take in this razor-sharp, yet tenderly forlorn, witty, nearly ritualized, and quietly unnerving tale, they will gingerly discern just how catastrophic this magnitude of silence and isolation would be.... HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Every work by DeLillo is literary news, and the urgency and catalyzing relevance of this concise, disquieting novel will exponentially accelerate interest.

DeLillo (Zero K) applies his mastery of dialogue to a spare, contemplative story of a group of New Yorkers and their response to a catastrophic shutdown of the world’s computer systems on the night of the Super Bowl in 2022.... In the end, readers gain the timely insight that some were born ready for disaster while others remain unequipped. While the work stands out among DeLillo’s short fiction, it feels underpowered when compared to his novels.