RaveThe Irish TimesEach encased in their own obsessions and anxieties, the characters in The Silence do not so much converse as make verbal noise, talking at each other in sardonic televisual soundbites, or in meandering monologues that seem pitched far beyond the confines of the room in which they are spoken. Unfolding for the most part in a single setting, and eschewing plot and character in favour of gnomic utterance and broken dialogue, DeLillo’s 17th novel reads remarkably like an absurdist play.The statements and soliloquies that fill The Silence bear DeLillo’s hallmark combination of aesthetic poise and cutting cultural commentary, and in such a pared-back novel, the author’s uncanny knack for tuning into the exact frequencies of contemporary living is on stark display ... In the tradition of two of DeLillo’s enduring influences – Beckett and Joyce, whose spectres haunt this book – The Silence contains moments of humour drier than a bone in the desert, and just as foreboding ... There is no narrative climax to The Silence – but then, no-one reads a late DeLillo novel for the action ... Locked into drastically reduced spheres of experience and grappling with the distortions the pandemic has wrought on our sense of time, readers of The Silence will feel the novel’s existential terror keenly.
