Book Review : Don DeLillo - The Silence (2020)
Don DeLillo loves to write about global crises, real or imagined. He wrote about an unspecified airborne toxic event in White Noise, life after 9/11 in Falling Man and seems overall obsessed by the idea that the stability of our world is an illusion we collectively chose to believe in. He was a natural to write about Covid. I don’t know if his novel The Silence is an allegory for the Covid crisis to properly speak of, but it is and forever will be his Covid novel. Whether he agrees with it or not, it became one.
It’s basically what this crisis did (outside of killing millions of people): Covid served as a reminder that things could happen whether we agreed with them or not.
There's a lot of moving pieces to The Silence for such a short novel (117 pages), but what you need know is that it revolves around a Super Bowl party for wealthy Manhattan folks. There’s Diane and Max who are hosting the even, Martin who’s one of Diane’s ex-students and Jim and Tessa who are arriving late because they’re flying from Europe. When every electronic system in the world fails, they find themselves contemplating and trying to explain away a whole lot of nothing looking forward.
The Failure(s) of Progress
A novel about a group of wealthy New Yorkers theoricizing about a global crisis, written by an elderly wealthy New Yorker is somewhat of a pretentious endeavor, but whoever isn’t expecting a Don DeLillo novel to be pretentious is either irrational or uninformed about Don DeLillo. The perspective from the intellectual and financial high horse is the very best thing about him and he doesn’t disappoint in The Silence, where he confronts the hard limits of the modern world that technology created.
So yeah, there’s a lot of solipsistic yapping by obscenely well-educated folks, but it is never to be taken as gospel. These characters think they know what the hell they’re talking about, but they don’t. It’s the point of the entire novel, portraying the unknown (and unknowable) as a great equalizer for all humans. Max and Martin and trying figure out what could be the cause of this great shutdown, but as they have no context to try and explain away what’s going on, they read the shadows on the wall like in Plato’s Cavern allegory.
Like, you know, the conspiracy people are doing.
Across town (because The Silence follows Jim and Tessa from the plane), our two brainy, elderly couple negotiate a plane crash, bond together through trauma and reconnect with their more primal selves. It’s apocalyptic and beautiful. The chapter where they are at the hospital for Jim’s cut on the forehead has to be my favorite in the novel. The Silence is not exactly visceral storytelling, but it comes together nicely if you can afford being patient with DeLillo’s undying love for conceptual storytelling.
The Ritual as a Necessity for Survival
The Silence is a 117 pages novel about wealthy and comfortable people panicking, but it’s also anchored around a Super Bowl party. Even more important, the host Max is obsessed about following the game and eventually recreates the game in his mind to compensate for the loss and delivers it orally to his wife and guests. It’s a scene from a medieval dinner party happening in the middle of present day Manhattan. Max eventually delves into other stories because he lost the Super Bowl to hang on to.
It’s about the thousandth time Don DeLillo talks about sport as a ritual in one of his novels. They serve as a unifying ritual in his worldview. Some sort of replacement for going to the church, which was a ritual everyone ended up not really wanting to do. In The Silence, Americans are losing their most important ritual and struggle to replace it with something meaningful. As Max and Martin rotate through a series of conspiracy theories to explain the power breakdown, they’re also rotating through important signifiers for American people. What I told you Don DeLillo was a conceptual writer, I wasn’t kidding.
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Don DeLillo is 88 years old and hasn’t published anything worth mentioning for four years now, so I wonder if The Silence is going to be his final novel. It would be an appropriate parting gift in these trying times as it is somewhat of a declaration of defeat of the illusion we collectively call modern society. It doesn’t mean we have to go back to dark and violent times. It doesn’t mean we traveled all that road for nothing, but it means we need each other more than ever. That we’re all we ever had.
7.5/10
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