The Silence

The Silence by Don DeLillo is a compact and sparse meditation on our digital connections, both to the world at large and our fellow human beings.

This is the type of book, really more of a novella than a novel, that will be hit or miss with most readers. It consists largely of monologues, delivered to others who may or may not be listening. That aspect alone will turn some readers off, there is nothing going on, well, except for the fact the world seems to have gone quiet, at least digitally.

Like many of DeLillo's books this one has as many ways into it as there are readers. Ignore those who like to make freshman type comments of "all of his books are the same book." It isn't that the statement is entirely wrong, it is that it means show more nothing. If one misses or chooses to ignore nuance, then yes, they are the same. But that is true of about 98% of fiction writers, so the point has zero actual meaning other than posturing. All you need to understand from that kind of comment, similar to the juvenile "bro-lit" comment, is that these readers didn't like the book. Those comments add nothing beyond that. Don't get me wrong, I think there are plenty of things that could turn a reader off of this book. Being supposedly the same book as all his others or the even more asinine bro-lit outlook aren't explanations, they mean little to nothing about this book, they speak far more about those readers and who they think they are or who they try to pass themselves off as being.

This is not my favorite of his books but it is definitely one of the more meaningful to life as it currently is. I actually bumped my rating up because over the couple days since I read it the first time, I kept thinking about the world within the work. And how I, or people I know, might act if we suddenly had no connection to the outside world with no explanation. Any book, fiction or nonfiction, long or short, that makes me ponder what is and what might be has succeeded on a level well beyond whether it is a "good" book. It is an impactful book, far more valuable in my world than simply a good book.

I do recommend this book to just about everyone. It is short, so even if it doesn't appeal to you it is only an hour or two of your time and it may still make you think even if you don't enjoy it. Among my friends, I will likely recommend to the vast majority, skipping those I know who would find it either boring or too full of talking that appears to go nowhere. For others, it will likely reward their two hour investment even if they might not really like it.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less

It’s Super Bowl Sunday. That much is clear. Max and Elaine are hosting a small gathering for the game. Martin, Elaine’s former student in college and now a physics teacher at an elite New York City high school, is one of the guests, though his preoccupation, as ever, is with Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Jim and Tessa are to be the other guests, but they are, at the moment, on a flight back from Paris. They may arrive a bit late. A cataclysm occurs (probably) and the aftermath is just as riveting as any Super Bowl football game could have been. Or just as dull.

This is DeLillo in very high form. So prepare yourself. Have a cold shower and a very dry martini, or three. Then take a deep breath.

Fortunately, despite show more announcing to us in the sub-title that it is a novel, you’ll find The Silence so brief that you may be able to read it all in one long exhalation. Of course it may take a few more readings to make peace with it, which no doubt justifies the novel ascription. I’m not there yet. I’m still meandering in the confused zone. But it felt like it meant something (probably). No doubt your reading will be superior to mine.

And so, gently recommended. But read it a few times just to be sure. show less

Delillo really knows, I think better than anybody, how to ride the line between real and surreal, natural and supernatural. This one carves the line. He also knows how to produce an experience. He doesn’t tell a story, or a message, he gives us an experience.

The plot is pretty simple. Delillo alternates between two converging sets of characters experiencing the same event. Jim and Tessa are on an airplane, flying from Europe back to the US, scheduled to land in Newark. Dianne, Max, and Martin are gathered in Dianne and Max’s New York apartment, watching the Super Bowl, waiting for Jim and Tessa to land and join them.

The event is a breakdown. It is, as Jim says, “the total collapse of all systems.” We don’t get a clear show more statement at any point of what the breakdown is or what caused it, but phones, computers, television all stop working. The airplane that Tessa and Jim are on crash-lands.

The event has both a natural and a supernatural feel. Natural because it’s a power failure, or a networking failure, or both. Supernatural because it throws us (the characters and the readers) into a kind of dream-like space, a limbo where, because technology isn’t happening, nothing is happening.

The characters, like the event, are poignantly under-described. Conversation is as much monologue as dialogue. Much of what you might think of as character development is left as much to the reader as it is provided by the author.

If this weren’t Delillo, we could expect the rest of the story to have to do with diagnosing, coping with, and resolving the breakdown.

But since it is Delillo, that’s not the way it goes. We do progress through Jim and Tessa’s survival of the plane crash, a quick fix for an injury to Jim, an equally quick sexual encounter that somehow serves as a response to their situation, and then their joining up with Diane, Max, and Martin.

But the rest of the story takes place in that dream-like limbo.

It’s as if time has stopped. Nothing is happening because everything that something happening depends on is gone. The limbo is the absence of our technological ground.

As a consequence, we get something like a time-slice through our world. What do you see when you slice through the world, with time stopped?

We get a meditation, in the end spoken by each of the characters. The meaning of everything we do and who we are comes to a stop. Meaningfulness itself feels likes it’s in limbo.

The limbo of course is one we’ve built ourselves, a kind of non-space made up of absent technology.

The voice of Martin, a physicist and former student of Diane, is one constant throughout — a meditation from Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein’s words are recontextualized into a commentary on the situation, culminating in Martin’s question at the end, “The world is everything, the individual nothing. Do we all understand that?”

Here is where I’m supposed to say what I think all this means. Well, no. Delillo is very good at producing an experience without the need for stating a message.

This book in particular is like a play, which of course Delillo is adept at writing. It’s the experience of the story, not the “message.” show less

Super Bowl Sonntag im Jahr 2022. Jim Kripps und Tessa Berens sitzen im Flieger aus Paris. Der Langstreckenflug geht an die Substanz, minutiös notiert Jim die ganzen Angaben, die auf dem Bildschirm über seinem Kopf erscheinen, auch wenn diese in Französisch sind und er nicht alles versteht. In New York wollen sie gemeinsam mit Freunden das Spiel des Jahres sehen. Diane Lucas und Max Stenner haben schon alles für den Fernsehabend vorbereitet, auch Martin Dekker, ein junger Physiklehrer und Dianes ehemaliger Schüler, ist schon da. Gerade als das Spiel begonnen hat, kommt es jedoch zu einem Stromausfall, der nicht nur Diane und Max‘ Wohnung, sondern ganz New York betrifft. Derweil kommt es auf dem Flughafen zu einer Notlandung, bei show more der ihre Gäste verletzt werden, die daher zuerst in ein Krankenhaus gebracht werden müssen.

Don DeLillo hat seinen Roman vor Ausbruch der globalen Pandemie beendet, nichtsdestotrotz finden sich durchaus einige Parallelen, vor allem in der Atmosphäre, die geprägt ist von einer gewissen Endzeitstimmung und der Tatsache, dass sich die Figuren einer unkontrollierbaren Situation ausgeliefert sehen. Auch dass es nur sehr wenig Interaktion außerhalb des kleinen Figurenzirkels gibt, spiegelt ebenfalls sehr gut die Lockdown-Situation wieder, die weltweit Millionen, wenn nicht Milliarden zur Kontaktbeschränkung auf den engsten Familien- und Freundeskreis gezwungen hat.

„Die Stille“ bricht plötzlich über die Menschen herein, wirft nicht nur alle Pläne über den Haufen, sondern stellt viele Konzepte der Figuren infrage. Versucht Jim im Flieger noch alles detailreich zu notieren, um später nochmals darauf zurückblicken zu können und sich nicht auf sein Gedächtnis verlassen zu müssen, sind seine Aufzeichnungen nach dem Crash einfach verloren. All die Mühe war umsonst und an das Ereignis selbst hat er gar keine Erinnerung. Mit einem Wimpernschlag wurde so die Gewissheit des Festhalten-Könnens zerstört.

Die Mitarbeiter im Krankenhaus haben alle Hände voll zu tun und funktionieren roboterartig. Warum Jim eine Wunde am Kopf hat, interessiert sie schon gar nicht mehr, jeder dort hat eine Geschichte zu erzählen, für die jedoch keine Zeit ist. Sie führen mechanisch die zugewiesenen Aufgaben aus und vermeiden das Philosophieren über die Gesamtlage; diese können sie ob ihrer Dimension ohnehin nicht erfassen.

In der Wohnung sieht Martin Dekker in Einsteins Theorie den ultimativen Referenzpunkt während Max noch amüsiert ist und die entstandene Leere mit Parodien der berühmt-berüchtigten Werbeclips des Super Bowl füllt. Die beiden könnten gedanklich kaum weiter auseinanderliegen, zeigen aber so die Spannbreite menschlicher Reaktionen auf eine Ausnahmesituation auf.

Endzeitszenarien haben mehrfach Eingang in DeLillos Romane gefunden, wie etwa ein Störfall in einer Chemiefabrik in „Weißes Rauschen“ oder das Leben nach der Welt, wie wir sie heute kennen, in „Zero K“. In seinem aktuellen Roman bleibt offen, was eigentlich geschehen und wie bedrohlich die Lage tatsächlich ist. Auch bietet er keine klare Deutung seines Textes an, viel Raum lässt er dem Leser selbst etwas aus dem Gelesenen zu machen. Ist es unser Verhältnis zur Technik, von der wir abhängiger sind als wir uns oft eingestehen wollen (und die wir schon lange nicht mehr verstehen – was sollen Jim all die Zahlen sagen und doch fliegt das Flugzeug)? An Martin zeigt er auch, wie die hohe Intelligenz und Bildung eher zur Verzweiflung führen, da die Gedanken in einen unkontrollierbaren Mahlstrom geraten und panisch versucht wird, das nicht Begreifbare zu erfassen. Andererseits auch das bewundernswert pragmatische Anpacke im Krankenhaus, manchmal ist es einfach die beste Lösung, das Naheliegende zu erledigen und mit Scheuklappen umherzugehen.

Don DeLillo gehört zweifelsfrei zu den besten zeitgenössischen Autoren der USA und unwillkürlich ist es ihm wieder einmal gelungen, die Stimmung der Stunde literarisch einzufangen. show less

When you read work of an old writer, one who’s famous, it takes some toll: you might be thinking of that person’s prior work, how they viewed the world back in the day.

I read DeLillo’s Libra before I read The Silence. That book was a mighty kind of marathon around dialogue and scenes; it was masterfully told, but I quickly tired of the main vein. That’s what killed the book for me.

This time around, DeLillo’s taken the pulse of modern times for a lot of western people by proving that he masters brief dialogue over carefully crafted and rhythmic language that swings between conversations in different worlds.

The book takes place in 2022 and starts off inconspicuously.

“He was Swedish,” she said.
“Who?”
“Mr. show more Celsius.”
“Did you sneak a look at your phone?”
“You know how these things happen.”
“They come swimming out of deep memory. And when the man’s first name comes your way, I will begin to feel the pressure.”
“What pressure?”
“To produce Mr. Fahrenheit’s first name.” She said, “Go back to your sky-high screen.”
“This flight. All the long flights. All the hours. Deeper than boredom.”
“Activate your tablet. Watch a movie.”
“I feel like talking. No headphone. We both feel like talking.”
“No earbuds,” she said. “Talk and write.”

She was Jim’s wife, dark-skinned, Tessa Berens, Caribbean-European-Asian origins, a poet whose work appeared often in literary journals. She also spent time, online, as an editor with an advisory group that answered questions from subscribers on subjects ranging from hearing loss to bodily equilibrium to dementia.

Here, in the air, much of what the couple said to each other seemed to be a function of some automated process, remarks generated by the nature of airline travel itself. None of the ramblings of people in rooms, in restaurants, where major motion is stilled by gravity, talk free-floating. All these hours over oceans or vast landmasses, sentences trimmed, sort of self-encased, passengers, pilots, cabin attendants, every word forgotten the moment the plane sets down on the tarmac and begins to taxi endlessly toward an unoccupied jetway.

One of the things that I enjoyed most about this book is that I think DeLillo doesn’t try to seem smart when writing. You can always tell when a writer wants their ego fed by injecting stuff designed to make others slap them on the back.

Most of the dialogue leaves everything about scenery to the reader:

“You can’t help yourself.”
“I don’t want to help myself,” she said. “All I want to do is get home and look at a blank wall.”

This is a thoughtful, carefully written, short, and beautiful novel. There is a lot of material in it, most of which make do for re-reading. It’s a jostling book in its ease. If I must compare it to anything, I’d go with Richard Linklater’s Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight trilogy, or perhaps Terry Malick’s Tree of Life. show less

It is Super Bowl Sunday in New York City, two years in the future. A man and wife, middle aged and well educated, are having a small gathering in their apartment to watch the game. One guest, a former student of the physics professor wife, has already arrived and another couple will be coming as soon as their plane from Paris lands. But just as the game is starting, the power inexplicably goes out along with all other means of electronic communication, throwing the world into a chaotic, albeit silent, state. So, what do people do when that happens? Apparently, they talk and wax philosophical until morning comes.

That is a very brief summary of Don DeLillo’s novel The Silence. However, to call this work a novel is a bit of a stretch; it show more likely does not even qualify as a novella, but reads more like a short story that has been extended just slightly beyond normal length. That distinction is important because after offering a provocative setup—what would happen if we were suddenly cutoff from all of our cyber dependencies?—the author does not really develop either the characters or the story in sufficient depth to address the topic in a compelling way. Instead, what the reader gets is a very cursory discussion of some high-brow topics (e.g., Einstein’s theory of relativity, cryptocurrencies) and even a quick, gratuitous reference to the COVID-19 crisis that occurred sometime earlier.

It is fair to compare this book to the author’s own estimable catalog of work. Not to the most brilliant of his novels (White Noise, Underworld, Libra), but to the lesser-known Cosmopolis, which also was published shortly after a cathartic global event (i.e., the 9/11 attack). Unfortunately, the comparison is not favorable for The Silence because that earlier book, while still concisely written, was developed with the sort of depth and insight that one would expect from a fully realized story. In fact, although Cosmopolis disappointed some readers by not being about the 9/11 tragedy directly, it proved remarkably prescient in predicting the advent of high-frequency trading and the Occupy Wall Street protests that would occur just a few years later.

I suppose it is worth noting that I have been a big fan of DeLillo’s work for many, many years. Like a lot of people, I was at first put off by the stilted and unrelatable characters he creates, but I soon learned that the author was writing novels about the important concepts that define our lives and that his characters were just delivery vehicles meant to convey the bigger message. And can he ever craft some amazing sentences! That much certainly remains true in this book, despite its failure to deliver on an otherwise promising premise. If I am disappointed in what I found here, it is only because I have been conditioned by this writer to set my expectations so very high. show less