THE SILENCE by Don DeLillo

 

The worst thing that could happen to all of us, at times, seems less like a nuclear holocaust that would render the planet a charred cinder than all of us being cast into our own self-designed hells. What if we had to talk to each other and depend on the function of collective wisdom and planning just to exist another day? What if the lights went out, the internet went blank, planes fell from the sky, and there were no distractions to mummify our individual sense of terror?Don DeLillo’s 2020  novel The Silence tells the story of five people gathered in a Manhattan apartment on Super Bowl Sunday in 2022, when a sudden, unexplained global event causes all digital technology to cease functioning. As usual, DeLillo stays in the world he knows and has chronicled so well over the decades—that of privileged white Americans relying on their powers of rationalization to convince themselves that things are fine and normal, even as the various systems that gave them affluence in the first place—finance, science, political skullduggery, technology, college-level obfuscation—fall apart and cease to operate. It might be said that DeLillo’s fictions have always been about the failure of belief systems that once seemed to explain and define the universe his characters inhabit. Just as the advances in science, philosophy, capitalism, ideology, and the rest en masse replaced the gods and became the de facto religious beliefs of the modern era, DeLillo highlights the death of these old-new gods. He shows how individual and collective dedication to various beliefs about how things *should* be leaves us clueless, comic, full of dread—doubling down on convictions that no longer convince anyone, at the core of their being, that anything is fixed in place.The Silence is that tale again, in brief—a terse and lyrical ode to a world that has literally run down, suddenly and seemingly permanently without the power to fuel our commerce and distractions. It is a comedy written on a philosopher’s sketchpad, a setup for a joke that just ends—no punchline. It makes you think, What the hell just happened?—which is the point. I’m inclined to think that’s the wrong question. Rather, we might ask: How long have we been walking in our sleep, earbuds connected to cell phones playing music we don’t even like? Has it all been white noise, in all things? Something worth asking—and a book worth reading from a great American novelist.