The Silence

August 3, 2020
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. While flying back to New York from vacation in Paris, Jim Kripps reads out the plane’s altitude and speed from a screen while his poet wife, Tessa Berens, plumbs her memory for trivial facts and marvels at her ability to recover information without the assistance of a phone. Jim, an everyman whom the author describes as “nondescript,” assumes the worst when the screens suddenly go blank. Their friend Max Stenner, who, with his professor wife, Diane Lucas, and her former student Martin Dekker, anticipate Jim and Tessa’s arrival at their Manhattan apartment to watch the game, is deeply shaken when his own screen goes blank before halftime. Martin entertains Diane by reciting passages from Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity, which lead to alternately profound and tepid discussions of the shutdown, the cause of which remains unexplained even after Tessa and Jim report to the group on surviving their crash landing and a ride through eerie, dark city streets. 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.

August 1, 2020
"Life can get so interesting," DeLillo writes, "that we forget to be afraid." It's a typically loaded statement from an author who has spent the last half-century navigating the border between fascination and fear. His 17th novel unfolds in such a middle ground. Beginning on a trans-Atlantic jetliner from Paris to Newark that loses power due to a global surge or disruption, it is a small book, precise in its calibration, about what happens when the world we've constructed, with all its technological interventions, goes dark. "Cyberattacks, digital intrusions, biological aggressions," DeLillo writes. "Anthrax, smallpox, pathogens. The dead and disabled. Starvation, plague and what else?" He may as well be describing the world outside the pages of his book. That's a tricky point to make because fiction needs to succeed or fail on its own terms, but DeLillo has always had his finger on a more collective pulse. In Players (1977) and Mao II (1991), he explored the aesthetic possibilities of terror; in Underworld (1997), he reimagined history through an individual, as well as a collective, lens. This book doesn't have that sort of scope or ambition; at just over 100 pages, it's more novella than full-length work. Still, in its account of five characters--Jim and Tessa, who survive the jetliner's crash landing; Max and Diane, their hosts in New York; and Martin, a former student of Diane's--this brief, disturbing story gets the sudden breakdown of society exactly right. The date is Super Bowl Sunday 2022, but when the grid goes down, the game is rendered moot. In its place, DeLillo investigates the disconnect between characters who claim to care for one another until disaster hits. The writing is spare and almost playlike, especially in the second section, which concludes with a series of monologues. This is a small but vivid book, and in its evocation of people in the throes of social crisis, it feels deeply resonant.

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Starred review from August 1, 2020
Jim and Tessa are flying back to New York from Paris. It's 2022. He is entranced by the screen tracking their flight. A poet, she is writing in a small notebook. As soon as they land, they will hurry to their friends' apartment to watch the Super Bowl. The plane begins to shake and lurch. Max has a lot of money riding on the game. He and his wife, Diane, a retired physics professor, and Martin, a former student enthralled by Einstein and given to metaphysical trances, are already in front of the superscreen TV. The broadcast image begins to shake and fracture. Then everything stops. All devices go dark. All falls silent. Battered and exhausted, Jim and Tessa, the one person of color among them, finally arrive after traversing a city in shock. A strange vigil begins. The couples talk in quick, clipped volleys. Martin recites the ills of the world: datasphere crime, the plague of microplastics, the threats of bioweapons. Might this be WWIII? 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)