[D66] The Silence by Don DeLillo review

[R.O.]

  The Silence by Don DeLillo review – Beckett for the Facebook age

Five characters attempt to deal with a digital shutdown in New York in 
DeLillo’s strangely heartless novella

Don DeLillo: his characters are ‘trapped in a kind of hell’. Photograph: 
Nicolas Guerin/Contour by Getty Images
Alex Preston <https://www.theguardian.com/profile/alex-preston>

Tue 27 Oct 2020 11.00 GMT

16
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/27/the-silence-by-don-delillo-review-beckett-for-the-facebook-age#comments>

It’s not coincidental, I think, that two major novelists have published 
books this year in which Albert Einstein plays a prominent role. In Ali 
Smith’s /Summer 
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/02/summer-by-ali-smith-review-a-remarkable-end-to-an-extraordinary-quartet>/, 
the proto-fascist schoolboy Robert Greenlaw searches for traces of 
Einstein’s presence in England and, through his reading of Einstein’s 
work, comes to understand better his place in space and time. Now, in 
his 18th novel, /The Silence/, Don DeLillo gives us Martin Dekker, an 
intense and inscrutable young man who is “lost in his compulsive study 
of /Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity//”/. 
Both novels ask us to consider what Einstein 
<https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/may/07/scientists-prove-einstein-right> 
would have made of the unique strangeness of our technological world, 
particularly how the internet has changed our relationship to time.

/The Silence /opens on an aeroplane. Jim Kripps and Tessa Berens are 
returning from Europe when their plane drops out of the sky. It’s the 
first indication of the “communications screw-up” that has caused all 
technology to grind to a sudden and catastrophic halt. Jim and Tessa 
escape the crash landing with scratches and – in the strange, dreamlike 
logic of this slight, surreal novel – make their way to the New York 
home of Max Stenner and Diane Lucas. The year is 2022 and it’s the day 
of Super Bowl LVI, when most Americans would be huddled around their 
televisions. Instead, there’s no television, no internet, and so Max and 
Diane sit with Diane’s former student, Martin, and wait. Jim and Tessa 
arrive, the day passes, Martin quotes Einstein. The story ends with no 
resolution, and little explanation as to what has caused the shutdown.

Don DeLillo: 'I wondered what would happen if power failed everywhere'
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/18/don-delillo-i-wondered-what-would-happen-if-power-failed-everywhere>
Read more
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/18/don-delillo-i-wondered-what-would-happen-if-power-failed-everywhere>

It’s clear – at least to the enigmatic Martin, who apparently has 
“access to world events” – that the failure of technology is one of the 
early shots in what may turn out to be the third world war. The whole 
novel feels like an attempt to answer the question posed in its own 
epigraph, a quote from Einstein: “I do not know with what weapons world 
war III will be fought, but world war IV will be fought with sticks and 
stones.” DeLillo is asking us to consider how much of our life is 
currently lived online, and how much of ourselves we would lose were we 
unable to access the internet. “What happens to the people who live 
inside their phones?” Diane wonders at one point. It feels like these 
explorations of technology and selfhood spring out of DeLillo’s previous 
novel, /Zero K 
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/15/don-de-lillo-zero-k-review>/, 
which explored cryogenics and the possibility of “downloading” a 
person’s mind prior to death.

At barely 10,000 words, this book sits somewhere between a long short 
story and a novella, further evidence of the sparseness that marks 
DeLillo’s late-career writing. Previously known for the exhaustive 
length of his novels, he hasn’t written book over 300 pages since 
/Underworld 
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/03/100-best-novels-underworld-don-delillo> 
/in 1997. The characters in the apartment in /The Silence/ could easily 
be trapped in a kind of hell, where their attempts to speak to one 
another only accentuate the terrible isolation that each of them 
inhabits. It’s as if DeLillo has decided to bring Samuel Beckett into 
the Facebook age. It makes for a book that feels oddly heartless, with 
little to balance against the overwhelming monstrousness of the world we 
have created (on and off-line). Reading DeLillo’s post-/Underworld/ 
novels has been a strange and melancholy affair, like watching an object 
of great brilliance recede, slowly, into the distance.

/• The Silence/ by Don DeLillo is published by Picador (£14.99). To 
order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com 
<https://guardianbookshop.com/the-silence-9781529057096.html>. Delivery 
charges may apply

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