From the National Book Award-winning author of Underworld, a “daring…provocative…exquisite” (The Washington Post) novel about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event. It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former … professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity.
Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed.
What follows is a “brilliant and astonishing…masterpiece” (Chicago Tribune) about what makes us human. Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of the Covid pandemic. His language, the dazzle of his sentences offer a kind of solace in our bewildering world. “DeLillo’s shrewd, darkly comic observations about the extravagance and alienation of contemporary life can still slice like a scalpel” (Entertainment Weekly).
“In this wry and cutting meditation on collective loss, a rupture severs us, suddenly, from everything we’ve come to rely on. The Silence seems to absorb DeLillo’s entire body of work and sand it into stone or crystal.” –Rachel Kushner
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Don DeLillo puts the entire world on hold.Every power grid has failed and people walk aimlessly unable to connect to their smart phones have become unmoored.A group who had planned to watch the Super Bowl grows anxious and slowly unravels.The author quotes Einstein who wrote I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones! The author writes Life can get so interesting we forget to be afraid.Our electronic world has rewired our brains The world is everything , the individual nothing !Do we understand that ?
It’s not nearly as funny as Ratner’s Star, but not a lot is. The Silence takes itself very seriously and I can understand why: it’s about a serious topic. Even if I didn’t entirely enjoy it, it’s better and more original than most contemporary fiction. Worth a look, for sure.
In this world of social media and digital everything, what would happen if we lost it all? No phones. No internet. No social updating or browsing. How would people even begin to communicate and interact with each other?
This is short but certainly gives you reason to pause and contemplate. I did however have some trouble getting through it as it tends to lag a bit but I still felt it was worth finishing.
Very disappointing, amounts to a sketch for what could be an interesting, post-modern reflection on our society and the threats we face, but it ends before it really starts.
Don DeLillo’s new novel, “The Silence,” asks where were you when the lights went out?
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.
This is the disturbing plot of “The Silence.” It is lean and spare, and feels like an Edward Albee play where the characters are ready to explode. However, “The Silence” is packed with deeper messages that will rattle the reader and force them to consider the larger universe.
Within the context of this calamity, each character’s essence is revealed. Martin becomes the prophet of doom philosophizing about the world’s collapse. Diane yearns for human connection, and questions her early retirement from teaching. Max doesn’t want to know the cause of the blackout, he’s a nuts-and-bolts building inspector – just fix the problem so the game can resume. Jim and Tessa are rooted in the reality of jet lag, and trying to get home.
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.”
Read the full review at http://www.Booktrib.com.