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<h1 class="css-10d1jpn">The Silence by Don DeLillo review –
Beckett for the Facebook age</h1>
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<p>Five characters attempt to deal with a digital shutdown in
New York in DeLillo’s strangely heartless novella</p>
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<div class="css-1qvfpal"><span class="css-l6t30p"><figcaption
class="css-xe26t6"><span class="css-1f2y4fi">Don DeLillo:
his characters are ‘trapped in a kind of hell’.</span>
Photograph: Nicolas Guerin/Contour by Getty Images</figcaption></span></div>
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<div class="css-1sq67yf"><a rel="author"
data-link-name="auto tag link"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/alex-preston">Alex
Preston</a></div>
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<div class="css-1kkxezg">Tue 27 Oct 2020 11.00 GMT</div>
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<p class="css-38z03z"><span class="css-hi9njr"><span
class="css-jwwgxz">I</span></span><span
class="css-38z03z">t’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 <em><a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/02/summer-by-ali-smith-review-a-remarkable-end-to-an-extraordinary-quartet"
data-link-name="in body link">Summer</a></em>,
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, <em>The
Silence</em>, Don DeLillo gives us Martin
Dekker, an intense and inscrutable young man who
is “lost in his compulsive study of <em>Einstein’s
1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of
Relativity</em><em>”</em>. Both novels ask us to
consider what <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/may/07/scientists-prove-einstein-right"
data-link-name="in body link">Einstein</a> would
have made of the unique strangeness of our
technological world, particularly how the internet
has changed our relationship to time.</span></p>
<p class="css-38z03z"><em>The Silence </em>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.</p>
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href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/18/don-delillo-i-wondered-what-would-happen-if-power-failed-everywhere">
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<div class="css-1gqsble">Don DeLillo: 'I
wondered what would happen if power
failed everywhere'</div>
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<p class="css-38z03z">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, <em><a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/15/don-de-lillo-zero-k-review"
data-link-name="in body link">Zero K</a></em>, which
explored cryogenics and the possibility of “downloading” a
person’s mind prior to death.</p>
<p class="css-38z03z">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 <em><a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/03/100-best-novels-underworld-don-delillo"
data-link-name="in body link">Underworld</a> </em>in
1997. The characters in the apartment in <em>The Silence</em>
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-<em>Underworld</em>
novels has been a strange and melancholy affair, like
watching an object of great brilliance recede, slowly,
into the distance.</p>
<p class="css-38z03z"><em>• The Silence</em> by Don DeLillo
is published by Picador (£14.99). To order a copy go to <a
href="https://guardianbookshop.com/the-silence-9781529057096.html"
data-link-name="in body link">guardianbookshop.com</a>.
Delivery charges may apply</p>
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