The Silence

A.D., for me, has come to mean not anno Domini but anno DeLillo, an unaccountable time after the annulment of time — after the fall seasons and spring seasons, after the sweeps-weeks and opening weekends, after the early and late editions, after the updates at 6 and at 10 ... Now — if we can agree to pretend that we know what 'now' is — the master has brought us The Silence: the latest installment in his chronicle of our unrelenting present ... There is something quixotic about what DeLillo has done: writing about contemporary culture even as it collapses into subcultures, and even as the democratic dream of a collective center is derided as suspicious in identitarian terms ... The Silence is even more bone-hard and skeletally spare than its predecessor, though its subject is considerably broader. In it, humans deprived of technology resign themselves to death, and not just to individual death but to cultural death, the end of the world, the end of time.

Dread is the predominant phenomenological mood in DeLillo’s work, and it directs his language, the hard, flinty poetry of a writer who seems to surmount despair only by his trembling, always self-doubting sense that within language there are mysteries that promise revelation, perhaps a shred of redemption ... The Silence evokes all this and more ... What is fascinating about how DeLillo deals with this high-concept idea is that he intentionally bleeds it of dramatic excitement ... All the advanced buzzwords of our technocapitalist era. Lest you think DeLillo, by tossing out these terms, is just throwing everything he can think of into a noisy vat of apocalyptic paranoia, understand that he uses the terms the way most of us hear them in real life: as signifiers for things we know are important, potent, and frightening, but which are surrounded by a mystery so deep that they make us feel baffled and helpless ... a sadness and pessimism about the American and planetary future that is without precedent in his work. But it is a beautiful book in the way tragedies can be beautiful: testaments to the strength of those who can face the dread with an inspiring honesty and integrity—which is another thing great writers teach us.

DeLillo’s new one is a pristine disaster novel with apocalyptic overtones. It’s a Stephen King novel scored by Philip Glass instead of Chuck Berry ... The good news about The Silence is that it’s engrossing and that, at 83, DeLillo’s syntax is as prickly as ever. I’m as attracted as anyone else to stories of doomed airplane flights and intimations of the end of the world, and DeLillo mostly held me rapt. I was never sorry to be holding this novel. The bad news, in addition to a certain amount of black-box, black turtleneck pretentiousness that is a hallmark of late-career DeLillo, is that The Silence reads like the first two chapters of a disaster novel. At 117 pages, it’s over before it gets started. It’s as if a filmmaker put two couples inside a remote old farmhouse for the weekend, cut the power, cued the dogs of hell and then rolled the credits ... a minor, oddly frictionless DeLillo novel. In terms of his career, it is not waterfall but spray. Posterity will be kind to him, but it will take relatively little note of this production.