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.
