Don DeLillo, _The Silence_

 I’VE READ THREE reviews of this—by Andrew O’Hagan, Michael Gorra, and Joshua Cohen (which feels fitting, an A-team novelist getting A-team reviewers)—and all three spent a bit more time on DeLillo’s standing, the DeLillo corpus and the DeLillian cosmos than they did on The Silence.

I can understand why. DeLillo looks to be one of the definitive American novelists, even the definitive American novelist of his generation, so any new arrival in his canon naturally prompts reconsideration of his whole canon, the mapping of connections to Underworld or White Noise, and so on.

I wonder, too, if any of the three would have been hard-pressed to meet their word count had they been restricted to writing about this book and only this book. Because it is (a) brief and (b) relatively uneventful.

Brief: just over a hundred pages, but small pages with generous white space. I think William Shawn would not have blinked at publishing the whole thing in one issue of the New Yorker back in the day.

Uneventful: a couple is returning to New York City from Europe with plans to watch the 2022 Super Bowl that evening with another couple, who will have a guest, a former grad student of the wife, who teaches physics. But all goes awry when the World Wide Web goes down all at once all over New York City and perhaps all over the world. There will be no watching of the Super Bowl—also no online shopping, finding of recipes, Zoom, or Spotify. We do not find out what caused the Silence, nor what its consequences will be, as the novel ends on the evening in question.

Have to admit, DeLillo touches a nerve. So much of life has migrated onto the internet and into the cloud, and with COVID, even more of it did—plenty of us are not even seeing our families in person this holiday, and internet connectivity is our sole consolation. So what would we do or could we do if the whole world of the Internet just abruptly vanished? On that score, in making us ponder the scenario, The Silence is at least thought-provoking.

But DeLillo does not speculate what would happen, beyond our being dumbfounded and paralyzed. The novel ends:

Max is not listening. He understands nothing. He sits in front of the TV set with his hands folded behind his neck, elbows jutting.

   Then he stares into the blank screen.