THE SILENCE - DON DELILLO

I wanted to shift my focus slightly and give the depressing nonfiction a bit of a break to focus on some novels. Originally, I was going to take on one of the older, pre-White Noise, DeLillo, since of the 8 or 9 books of his I’ve read, they’re almost from his more popular later period. I backtracked on that plan when I looked him up in the library and noticed this small tome that, apparently, was published last year. It’s easily the shortest book of his career, it’s even shorter than Pafko at the Wall, which is just a section of UNDERWORLD. The 116 pages are padded out, the font is large and the margins seem smaller than is typical. I doubt that an author less famous that DeLillo would be able to publish this. Which is not to say it isn’t good, it’s just that the book reads like a segment or outline of a larger book. Perhaps an earlier scene from a large novel. The premise definitely seems to lend itself to a large novel. The plot revolves around a Superbowl 2022 party (where the Seahawks are playing) during which all electronics mysteriously stop working. It’s unclear why this has happened, people speculate everything from Chinese cyber-attack to sunspot, or even how widespread it is, but we only get to see this disaster through the eyes of the guests at this somewhat ritzy Superbowl party. In one sense it reminded me of BLINDNESS, which also features a disaster that happens for seemingly no reason then deals with the fallout. This book feels like it should have been that long or longer. It’s interesting to see old authors try to tackle the ways in which the internet has changed our lives. I’m also reminded here of BLEEDING EDGE. It’s all written in the classic DeLillo style, that I was going to call gnomic and aphoristic, in which every character seems to speak in a very particular, DeLillo-esque way, but, since he’s a genius, he describes it better than I could, “Half sentences, bare words, repetitions. Diana wanted to think of it as a kind of plainsong, monophonic, ritualistic, but then told herself that this is pretentious nonsense.” See, he’s even got a sense of humor about it. Overall, I’d say I was impressed by the way he conveys the confusion and swirl of modern life. He captures how alone it feels and how nothing in the world seems to make any sense. He’s currently 84 so I don’t think he has it in him to write another 400+ page novel which is what this book actually needs to be. I’d love him to flesh out a world where electronics simply stop and what that would mean for modern people. But, you get what you get. This book was a tease, but it’s a tease you can read in one sitting. I wouldn’t say it’s the first DeLillo I’d recommend but it’s impressively worthwhile for something he wrote in his 5th decade of literary fame. 2022 blank screens.