The Silence by Don DeLillo

Published by Scribner on October 20, 2020

Reasons for fear multiply every decade. Bioweapons. Nuclear weapons. Genetic warfare. Satellite surveillance and cellphone tracking. An overheating Earth. Microplastics in our air, water and food. The characters in Don DeLillo’s The Silence consider multiple sources of fear as they try to explain the inexplicable. Has time collapsed? Have our minds been digitally remastered? Is human existence “an experiment that happens to be falling apart?”

What exactly has taken place in the near-future (2022) setting of The Silence is unclear. A power failure silences televisions and brings the world to a halt, but what caused the power to fail? Sunspots? An electromagnetic pulse? An alien invasion? If we are all living inside a form of virtual reality, perhaps someone pulled the plug. Or the newfound silence might portend the stilling of normal experience, “a deviation in nature itself.” One character asks, “Is this the casual embrace that marks the fall of world civilization?”

The relatively brief story follows a handful of characters. Jim Kripps and his wife Tessa Berens are on an airplane, talking about the randomness of human memory (as opposed to the completeness of digital memory) while Jim reads aloud the flight data from a monitor — “Filling time. Being boring. Living life.” The plane crashes, apparently while landing, although Jim is upset that they missed the pre-landing snack. Tessa remembers that they were “sort of floating” as the plane came down and Jim remembers banging his head on the window, leaving him with a minor injury. An ambiguous van transports them to an ambiguous clinic where Jim gets ambiguous treatment for the cut on his head. Perhaps to celebrate still being alive — if they are — Jim and Tessa duck into a restroom for a quickie. Others who enter the building have their own stories: stalled elevators, an abandoned subway, barricaded storefronts. Building employees have no explanations — they are there to stitch wounds, not to answer questions — and they surely don’t have a better understanding of “the situation” than anyone else.

Jim and Tessa were planning to join Diane Lucas and Max Stenner for the Superbowl. Martin Dekker has dropped in on Diane and Max, although he does not seem to be an entirely welcome guest. Diane taught physics before she retired and Martin is her former student. When the television screen goes dark, Max surveys their neighbors and reports that they are not blaming the Chinese for the power outage. The implication is that Max might. It seems the absence of evidence will not stand in the way of conspiracy theories that are growing in the street, although without the internet, they need to spread from mouth to mouth.

Martin channels Einstein while Max adds color commentary to the game that has disappeared from the screen. Diane wonders if the game is still unfolding in Deep Space and only Max is attuned to it. Whatever the cause, Diane is happy to see Max so animated after so many years of watching him become one with the television.

Reading The Silence reminded me of watching Lost on television. I loved the characters while I wondered about the explanation for the story’s strange events. Early on in The Silence, I thought “maybe these people are all dead and not yet prepared to enter Heaven.” That would be even more disappointing coming from Don DeLillo than it was coming from the writers of Lost. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. (I have to say, though, I was a fan of the writing on Lost until the writers wrote themselves into a corner from which they couldn’t escape.)

Characters ponder explanations for their surreal present. Martin wonders if the Earth has entered a makeshift reality, a “future that isn’t supposed to take form just yet.” Tessa suggests this might be “some kind of a living breathing fantasy.” She asks: “What if we are not what we think we are? What if the world we know is being completely rearranged as we stand and watch or sit and talk?” But what has happened and why is something DeLillo chooses not to reveal. Perhaps he means to tell us that speculation about possible causes of a consequential event (like a pandemic) can become more important than the actual cause. Or perhaps his point is that the best use of a disaster is to reflect on how little we understand about our own existence.

The story is certainly open to interpretation. It seems in part to be a commentary on the role that technology plays in life. The more advanced we are, the more vulnerable we become. When facial recognition systems go down, how can we be sure of our identities? How does one respond to a loss of the systems that drive modern life? Should we be philosophical or should we concentrate on the concrete: “food, shelter, friends, flush the toilet if we can? . . . Touch, feel, bite chew. The body has a mind of its own.”

Martin reminds us that Einstein thought the next war would be fought with sticks and stones. Are we prepared for that possibility? Martin has difficulty thinking without reference to two-factor verification and gateway tracking. When he pronounces, “The world is everything, the individual nothing,” Max can only stare into the blank screen that once brought the Superbowl into his living room. Without a connection to the world, perhaps we have nothing. How can we survive without our cellphones and email to sustain us? How do we know our place in the world if we don’t know who won the Superbowl?

Having centered White Noise around “an airborne toxic event,” DeLillo is no stranger to fictional disasters. While White Noise is a dark comedy, I was never sure whether I was meant to laugh at The Silence. Characters have conversations that are amusing, primarily because the topics are unexpected, but the humor that lightens the darkness in White Noise is largely absent from The Silence. On the other hand, it is never clear whether the power failure in The Silence is the harbinger of darkness to come or a temporary glitch. That uncertainty prevents the novel from being categorized as dystopian.

This is a shorter and less ambitious novel that most of DeLillo’s work, but the style is vintage DeLillo — every word carefully chosen, every phrase a perfect encapsulation of beauty, every sentence infused with raw energy, every paragraph a surprise. Readers might want to pull The Silence off the shelf every now and then to see whether a fresh reading will unlock new meanings. Few writers encourage me to revisit their work in the hope of undiscovered rewards, but DeLillo is one of them.

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