"The Silence" by DeLillo (2020)

 

The master of 'show but not not' did it again... or didn't. Anyway, in this novel, DeLillo is concerned about one question: "What happens when people live inside their phones?"

The story is straightforward, no side-tracks, no leeways. Jim and Tessa are on a flight from Paris en route to NY to meet their friends and become stranded in their apartment when an event of an apocalyptic scale disables anything electronic and digitized and submerges the globe in total silence. 

Not making it to the headlines, the catastrophe remains nameless and open to speculation: selective internet apocalypse/ communication screwup/ a mass power station failure/ cyberattack/ digital intrusion/ deviation in nature/ etc. The event is more like an undertow to the story, white noise in the background. 

It's not important. 

What matters here are the interactions of the characters themselves and how they first absorb the shock and adjust to the new reality as they fill in the silence by either 'talking talking talking' for the sake of talking or staring at the blank, black surfaces of their mobile phones and tablets and TVs, or engaging in awkward conversations, realizing that 'each has become a mystery to the others', strangers in a strange world. And, paradoxically enough, some others are rejoicing as they 'accepted the shutdown' when Max says 'All my life I've been waiting for this without knowing' which instantly reminded me of Haruki Murakami's 'Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to happen'.

The first third of the book was rough and bumpy. The exposition and dialogues were extremely and painfully jarring as the narrative 'skipped and skidded for a while' just like the plane crash landing. The reading experience felt like a bunch of AIs making snippets of exchanges. I admit, DeLillo is brilliant at the sentence level, but so terrible at the conversation level. Eighty+ years and he doesn't know how normal chit-chat works. I'm not making that up, and he sort of admits it, "much of what the couple said to each other seemed to be a function of some automated process". Luckily, when I got over the state of 'totally impaired orientation' and got a sense of the context, I felt that dread before the disaster, that restless calm before the calamity, that thrill of mixed curiosity and anticipation and elation when something truly bad somewhere is happening and we're at its fringes, safe and not safe.

If DeLillo was aiming for the readers to feel these two distinct feelings on purpose—growing distant from the characters' dysfunctional interactions at the beginning and vicariously relating to their experiences later—then, I believe, the master of 'show but not tell' did it again. The two different impressions mimic the shock and the aftershock: first, you're feeling confused and don't know what's happening, but after the event is over, you begin to rationalize what has just happened.

Brilliant!

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Summary:

Don DeLillo's The Silence is 90% similar to Ruman Alam's Leave the World Behind, or is it the other way around? That's weird since both of these books were published in the same year, 2020. Or perhaps the collective panicking caused by the COVID-19 outbreak in 2019 was to blame. Regardless, The Silence concerns itself more with the prevalent, chronic dependency on technology rather than the event that caused its shutdown.

Forget the low reviews, go for it blindly, and make up your own impression of it. Personally, I found it subtle and smart. DeLillo is treating prose as an impressionist, sprinkling ideas here and there, and it's up to the readers to make a picture that makes sense to them.