PanThe Seattle Times\"Paranoid thinking abounds and it shows in the characters’ clipped dialogue. Much of what they say is incomplete and comes across as a cacophony of SEO buzzwords associated with the deep web and obscure references ... Because of this quality, the work feels unfinished. Its philosophical demeanor presents like a TED Talk — a pontificating voice, rehearsed gestures, long pauses to digest. But digest what? One senses there is something of substance lurking below the surface, but, ultimately, it is underdeveloped. Instead, we are given a thin philosophical broth. Nevertheless, from what I can distill, The Silence is about language fighting for primacy in a world inundated with images and screens ... The lethargic characters, the clipped, echoing dialogue and the philosophical banter are all very reminiscent of Samuel Beckett, a masterful minimalist whose work strongly resonates with the peculiar psychological toll of quarantine. But whereas Beckett did so much with so little, leveraging these constraints to create a dense network of connections for readers to parse, DeLillo severs these connections before they can bloom.\
