When I was at university it felt like Don DeLillo was one of the most important contemporary writers that you should be reading if you wanted to be serious about literature. His novels “White Noise” and “Libra” were hailed as brilliant critiques of American society and “Underworld” was considered one of the finest recent works worthy of that canonical accolade 'Great American Novel'. I have no quibble with his lofty position in literature's firmament, but I will say that while I appreciate and enjoy his novels I have never loved them. I've found it curious that over the past two decades he's produced a series of relatively slender novels compared to the girth and swagger of “Underworld”. I haven't read any of his books since the publication of “The Body Artist” in 2001 so I was excited to dive into his latest novel.
“The Silence” is only 116 pages long with large type so I read the novel aloud in its entirety to my partner while we were on a recent cross-European car drive. Since we're in the midst of a pandemic we weren't allowed to stop in certain countries such as France or Switzerland (because their rates of infection are high and we'd have to quarantine when we got back to the UK if we interacted with anyone there.) So reading aloud from a dystopian novel that ominously predicts the breakdown of our technology-addicted world was quite a visceral experience. Luckily my partner and I weren't flying because the novel describes a couple's journey on a plane from Europe to America. During their flight an inexplicable technological “blackout” occurs across the world leading them to crash. However, after dealing with the administrative process that follows the wreckage, they continue with their planned trip to visit a friends' house to watch the Super Bowl despite the fact that their computers, phones and television don't work anymore. The year is 2022 and, though it appears the modern world has utterly collapsed, it feels like nothing is more important to this assemblage of people than carrying on with this great American tradition of watching a football game.
This dialogue-heavy novel has the tone of an absurdist play by Harold Pinter or Eugene Ionesco. Stripped of their virtual connection to the wider world, the individual characters are reduced to sputtering near nonsense acting out what they assume would have been announced on the television or conjuring conspiracy theories about the reason for this technological breakdown. Their thoughts are clouded with the jargon of advertisements and sensational news headlines. It's as if the characters have become so accustomed to virtual engagement that their ability for actual verbal and physical communication has atrophied. Amidst what has become our almost total reliance on technology, DeLillo overtly refers to Einstein's ominous prediction: “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” This novel is posited on that precipice of civilisation's regression. It also asks timely questions about what's left of our personalities when our virtual identities disappear.
I enjoyed the way this book paints a thought-provokingly surreal picture of the world and how its characters differently get lost in the echoing ruins of their interior reality. But it's a novel that's much more about its mood and atmosphere than forming a probing study of personality. I found it perplexing how one of the wives engages in a bungled erotic exchange with her esoteric former student who has crashed the Super Bowl party. Tessa Berens, a mixed-race character from the plane who obsessively records things in her notebooks, at one point “studies the backs of her hands as if confirming the color, her color, and wondering why she is here and not somewhere else in the world, speaking French or a kind of splintered Haitian Creole.” It's irritating to me when white authors include a non-white character in their stories and then inevitably make their skin colour into a point of identity crisis. This contributed to the sense that these individuals are just character sketches rather than fully fleshed out human beings. Otherwise, I appreciated the unsubtle way DeLillo hammers out his points concerning the modern world because in a political climate dominated by certain factions that barely bother concealing their contempt for humanity there's probably little need for subtlety in novels. In his later years, this accomplished author seems to have found his niche in producing slim finely-carved set pieces that dramatise his worst fears.
