While an interesting addition to Don Delillo’s oeuvre, it’s also almost a literal footnote to his other books. A critic of Delillo’s once said that he believed that Delillo wrote critical theory essays disguised as stories. A book like this would do little to dissuade them.

This won't be a typical review. I read it a while ago and I was extremely disappointed at the time. I really wanted to give a review but what I wrote at the time was a little too scathing for me to consider appropriate. I'll say it was a disappointment, for sure. The Silence is hopefully an anomaly, as it's the first work of his that I would consider a disappointment. I wish I had more to say but it was a big disappointment when I read it. I love every single one of Delillo's previous books but I felt like he phoned this one in. I can't really hold it against him though. He's getting old and he's already done so much. Maybe I'll revisit it some time and I hope to get more out of it.

I honestly feel like I’ve read a handful of stream of consciousnesses, with no end goal. This basically covers a weird Third World War where all electrical communications and devices don’t work. This following and documenting a few peoples responses. It’s super short, so if you wanted to read it, it won’t take long. But I have very little clue as to what I read and why.
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The premise was enticing, but I found the book hard to follow. Mostly dialogue driven with some internal monologue. I wanted a better understanding of the characters and what was happening around them. Didn't hook me.

Hardly a story, let alone a book. Amusing to see DeLillo practicing his impressionistic games for a bit, but even at 40 double spaced pages, or whatever this properly amounts to, it's exhausting.

As always, DeLillo delivers. The Silence moves quickly but lacks a bit when it came to keeping me engaged. Fans of Don Delillo won't be disappointed and this is sure to be a good choice for libraries to carry. This book definitely provides food for thought, and without spoiling anything, provides a different sort of danger.

This book has a really compelling scenario and is really timely coming out just as the pandemic was rearing its ugly head. Unfortunately the dialogue is very stilted and just didn't ring true for me. I really loved White Noise by this author years ago and I was hoping for something similar with this one, ie an incisive skewering of our present moment. Obviously that is not this book and I'm not really sure what the author was trying to do here, even the building sense of foreboding and terror was blunted by the obtuseness of the narrative and I was left confused in the end. I will certainly try this author again but I just didn't jibe with this one.

Don DeLillo turns 84 here in a few weeks. For nearly 50 years (his debut Americana arrived in 1971), and particularly following the publication of White Noise in 1985 when he gained widespread attention and a National Book Award, he has been known as an interrogator of the dystopian present. His books can feel like science fiction, but it's surprising how they really dwell in the here and now, with only the slightest twist.

DeLillo's latest is no exception. It takes place on Super Bowl Sunday, 2022, but, especially given the year we're having, it feels like today. When the book begins, Jim, a claims adjuster (DeLillo really knows how to pick jobs like that for his characters) and Tessa, a poet, are flying to Newark from Paris. Once they get to the airport, they intend to quickly make their way to their friends' apartment to watch the big game. It's not going to be an easy trip.

We go to that apartment in Manhattan where a thrilling trio (I'm kidding -- they are so boring and isolated from each other) is waiting for Jim and Tessa. Here we meet Max and Diane and a young physicist named Martin. They're engaged in the substantial but meaningless pre-game babble and are already looking forward to the half-time food.

Just around the time of the kick-off: "Something happened then." In their apartment -- all over the world -- electronics fail. Televisions shut off. Phones fail. Laptops go lifeless. Planes fall from the sky.

While this is not a new premise -- the failure of technology is a familiar trope of dystopian novels all the way back -- in the hands of DeLillo it has the potential to be more than a thought experiment. Again, while this has not happened yet in our world of 2020 (which I wouldn't be surprised to learn is an alternate reality DeLillo concocted and figured out how to get us all really immersed), DeLillo knows how to make it familiar, how to bring our own anxieties, our own isolation and despair, to the table.

I found it fascinating, as usual. DeLillo is exploring the idea that technology has fundamentally transformed the way we experience the present. Without it, our perception of reality and of each other will change again, only this time we might not be able to handle it. The meaninglessness we subject ourselves to on our screens is a great way to mask the meaninglessness we could not otherwise bear.

If this sounds a bit like White Noise, I think that's entirely fair. However, I will say that The Silence is quite a different form, and naturally a lot has happened since 1985. For one, The Silence is a small work, at only somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 words (I've seen both and didn't bother to do the math myself). It's eerie and unpleasant. Unpleasant in a few ways: first, naturally, DeLillo's world and its small population are disconnected from each other. But also, this is an unpleasant read because it's so empty, soulless . . . deliberately, I think, but nevertheless.

DeLillo begins the book with Jim looking at the flight information on the screen. Of course I know the feeling. Again, it's familiar. It's super dull, but DeLillo still manages to make it hum with the airplane engine's drone and Jim's anxiety.

The man touched the button and his seat moved from its upright position. He found himself staring up at the nearest of the small screens located just below the overhead bin, words and numbers changing with the progress of the flight. Altitude, air temperature, speed, time of arrival. He wanted to sleep but kept on looking.

Heure à Paris. Heure à London.

"Look," he said, and the woman nodded faintly but kept on writing in a little blue notebook.

He began to recite the words and numbers aloud because it made no sense, it had no effect, if he simply noted the changing details only to lose each one instantly in the twin drones of mind and aircraft.

"Okay. Altitude thirty-three thousand and two feet. Nice and precise," he said. "Température extérieur minus fifty-eight C."

This goes on for several pages. It's incisive: the focus on the words we've all heard a thousand times -- overhead bin, upright position; the desire for sleep that cannot overcome the compulsion to look at information that becomes meaningless within seconds.

Several pages later (no, it's not exciting, but I couldn't look away), Jim is still looking at the screen. While we know why, under the surface, because we've been there, it's articulated quite well by DeLillo.

"Time to destination one hour twenty-six. I'll tell you what I can't remember. The name of this airline. Two weeks ago, starting out, different airline, no bilingual screen."

"But you're happy about the screen. You like your screen."

"It helps me hide from the noise."

Everything predetermined, a long flight, what we think and say, our immersion in a single sustained overtone, the engine roar, how we accept the need to accommodate it, keep it tolerable even if it isn't.

This opener is dull; it's unsettling. It's pretty perfect for what I think DeLillo was going for.

Yes, it's brilliant, I say now, though I don't pretend it wasn't hard going as a read. As I mentioned above, this is a small book. I read it twice and skimmed once. I didn't enjoy it at all for its story or plot or suspense. But that seems beside the point. I don't think DeLillo cares if we enjoy it in that conventional way. He's not writing a thriller, after all. It's almost the opposite: this is about the anxiety, not the thrill, of a collapse that uncovers meaninglessness. This collapse is not the difficult birth of a better age.

It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, plan to gather for dinner, in an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. What happens next is an unexpected event after which no screens/devices work. Suddenly the appliances that made our lives easier cease to exist. We obviously cannot live without our screens, we WOULD go crazy. But did these 5 people go crazy? What type of conversations do they have is the ominous story of The Silence.

The story is divided into two parts - Part one, lives of these said 5 people, not interesting, nor intriguing. The second part is the core that lifts this book!! It deserves all the praises, that is IF you sit through the first part. The conversations these people have are so relatable because as a woman of science, those will be the exact way my mind would wander too. Without technology to control, suddenly all of human inventions fall back to the past; nuclear meltdowns, satellite malfunctions, demand for rations, etc.

This is a thoroughly well thought novel, but if more effort were put into the first part, it would’ve been a hit among many of us! Thank you Netgalley, Scribner for the arc in exchange for an honest opinion.

Sometimes you just need a short book. The idea for this one was timely and smart, however the execution fell short. The dialogue between characters was so odd and hard to adjust to or get past. And I never felt like the characters were as terrified as they should have been if this were really happening in these times.

2020 is the year we all became even more dependent on our screens, with technology mediating work, school, relationships, and entertainment. In The Silence, the world is hit with the opposite - the sudden stoppage of all telecommunications technology, and the characters have to navigate their Nnew York lives without it (during the Superbowl).

Don DeLillo has attracted an audience for decades to his imaginative and, at times, confusing books. I have to confess that The Silence left me baffled. The action is described not in a linear way and then, just when I thought I might be getting a clue as to what this book was about...it ended. I thought I hadn't gotten a complete copy, but no: it just ends. My hat is off to readers who are able to decipher and enjoy this book.

The Silence by Don DeLillo is an interesting book about a pandemic of a different type, one that infects not humans but the power grid. This premise allows for DeLillo to explore interesting themes about human connection and our reliance on technology, but in a way that fell flat for me. Being quite a short read—it comes in at just barely over 100 pages—nothing feels fully developed, and the characters act as movers for theory rather than actual people, as if DeLillo really wanted to wright an essay but couldn’t break away from the novel form.

Published online at goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3630515071

Review of *The Silence* by Don DeLillo

DeLillo is an influential modern American writer known for his past novels *Underworld* and *White Noise*, among others. *The Silence* writes about five people gathering for the Superbowl in 2022 when a catastrophe hits.

DeLillo finished this book just before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and his novel of life in crisis is strangely prescient.

DeLillo, like Irving or Moody or even Salinger, writes about the nihilism and coldness at the heart of the educated upper middle-class world. It is certainly no surprise to anyone that even a life of priviledge can be empty and painful. DeLillo doesn't have any novel answers to offer, but offers comfort of a sort by portraying familiar struggles through largely sympathetic characters.

It's impossible to review this book without referring to the similarities of the reactions of the characters to their catastrophe to our own reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. At one point, the novel reflects that "isn't it strange that certain individuals have seemed to accept the shutdown, the burnout? Is this something they've always longed for, subliminally, subatomically?" which sent a shiver of recognition through me.

At times the novel resembles theater of the absurd, like the characters talking past each other in *No Exit*. But the five gathered in Manhattan for the Superbowl are less flawed and more recognizable. DeLillo's dystopia is not as heavy handed as those of Orwell or Huxley. The alienation of modern society by technology and late-stage capitalism has obvious connections to Marx, and DeLillo has enough respect for a 21st century ready to avoid a tiresome polemic. But the characters' alienation is as poignant as anything in Sartre or Huxley or Marx. *The Silence* is recognizable and real, and is profound in its own way. If *The Silence* were as long as *Underworld*, it might be too much for my pandemic-stressed psyche to take, but at only 128 pages it comes across as a conversation with a sympathetic and brilliant stranger.

A bit of a strange story, written in halting speech which feels like a play script, complete with descriptions of even the most mundane details. The language of the writing is precise, literal, lyrical at times and thought possessing, as the characters take us through the plot. Not an unthinkable premise, the main event, but certainly an unwelcome one in which many may have thought about its implications, but not in such a close scenario. It ‘s not that I didn’t appreciate the story, especially with it’s well written prose, it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

I really enjoyed this book I received via Netgalley. The author's premise about where our society is headed was interesting. I also loved how the author referenced back to Einstein saying he didn't know what the third world war would be fought with but the fourth world war would be fought with sticks and stones.

The Silence is perfectly DeLillo. It is almost too short, but it covers a lot of ground and themes in its compact size. DeLillo dialogue is an entity of its own, like an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. It is fast, sharp and cutting. The timing of the completion of the book and its publication is almost prescient.

The reader is left to question the importance technology plays in their lives and how we relate to one another. How that relating changes when technology is removed and the unknown takes its place. This book is like a fever dream.

This is a compelling scenario. The much-feared technology crash arrives. Planes crashland. Devices go dark. Dread approaches. Delillo, as deft as ever, conjures this up swiftly, powerfully and approximately, through a bunch of a character’s in a sequence of theatrical scenes. But then - the silence. Is it over, in a specific or apocalyptic sense? We will never know. This master’s short novel/narrative drama is too brief to hold or tell us. But it starts well.

When we’re talking about the best American writers of the past half-century, everyone’s going to have a different list, but there are certain names that will likely appear on most of them. One of those names is Don DeLillo, who has written some of the most impactful literature of his generation. Books like “White Noise,” “Underworld” and others are significant parts of the 20th century canon.

And he’s still going strong.

DeLillo’s latest novel – his 17th, but who’s counting? – is “The Silence,” a slim volume that takes a look at what it might mean for our precarious and codependent relationship to technology to be unceremoniously ripped away, leaving nothing but the quiet echo of our own thoughts. How has this proliferation of tech impacted our ability to engage with one another – and are we able to get back what was lost.

“The Silence” is a lightning-fast read – just 128 pages – but no less engaging for its brevity. It is thoughtful and thought-provoking, a quick-hit of a novel one assumes is intended to mirror the bite-sized rapid consumption encouraged by our current relationship to media both old and new.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday in 2022 – as big a secular holiday as exists in American culture. The Tennessee Titans will be facing off against the Seattle Seahawks as millions of people around the country – and the world – prepare for our massive football finale.

In an apartment on Manhattan’s east side, three people sit, waiting for two more. Max is the most interested in the game – he’s got a history of rather large bets on sporting events and this one is no exception, so he’s anxious to see how things are going to play out for him. His wife Diane, a former professor of physics, is less interested in the game and more interested in the company of their guest, one of her former students, a high school physics teacher and Einstein obsessive named Martin.

Their soon-to-be guests – Jim and Tessa – are on a flight from Paris to New York. Jim is tense about flying, while Tessa, a noted poet, is less concerned. However, Jim’s tension proves well-founded as … something happens. Panicked pilots and attendants, a lurching plane – what is to come? Are they about to be a headline?

Alas, it turns out that there’s far bigger news coming.

See, it appears as though everything electrical and electronic has simply stopped working. Television, the internet, cellular devices – all gone. The power is out. And it doesn’t look like it’s coming back.

Jim and Tessa have found their way to the party – even if there isn’t much of a party – but all five of these people are left to gradually come to terms with what this newfound absence might mean for them. Max is slowly losing himself in a projected version of the game, calling the action and reciting the commercials. Martin is fading into his Einstein obsession, digging deep into relativity and wandering so close to his idol that he even starts speaking in German. And the others each find ways to uneasily engage with the absence of understanding and their inability to use the usual means for gaining that understanding.

The minutes keep ticking away into the silence … and the temperature slowly drops.

“The Silence” packs a fair amount of punch considering its length – DeLillo has shown himself over the years to be a deft hand with a “less is more” approach, though he’s also unafraid to go big – and manages to evoke the fearfulness that comes with lack of connection and communication. DeLillo’s no stranger to themes of isolation either, and considering the current state of affairs, “The Silence” feels rather prescient.

(It should be noted that this book was completed mere weeks before the COVID-19 outbreak. There is a line here that specifically name checks the disease, but it appears as though that line was added after the fact – and reportedly not by DeLillo.)

Nobody does low-key existential dread and creeping paranoia quite like DeLillo, which is a handy skill set to have when we’re talking about society’s difficulties with adjusting to the exponential explosion of technological growth. He tackled similar themes in his previous book, though there is a simplicity to “The Silence” that rings differently from something like “Zero K.”

And it should be noted that DeLillo never really delves into his sci-fi premise – we never learn much about hows or whys. Rather, he chooses to focus on the aimlessness that sets in when we lose our tether to the world as we understand it. In today’s world, technology serves to anchor us, giving us a focal point from which our interactions radiate like spokes on a wheel. So what happens when the hub disappears? In “The Silence,” we get five people talking past the problem, so adamant on ignoring the elephant in the room that they practically forget there’s an elephant at all.

In truth, “The Silence” feels very much like a COVID-19 novel, despite being written beforehand. It’s a story of losing connection, of losing the ability to communicate with one another, of being left alone by a crisis that has no end in sight. Its relevance to the moment is accidental, but no less impactful because of that.

“The Silence” is a snapshot, a flash of interpersonal interaction in the face of global disconnection. It’s a book with a sci-fi high concept that it barely acknowledges, opting instead to show us the dynamics of individuals confronted with an ending they can’t possibly understand. And so, they just keep talking in the face of the impending and inevitable silence.

I had mixed feelings on this book. While I thought it was very interesting, in terms the subject matter and how Don DeLillo approached them, I did not find it to be the most approachable of books. I found myself having to read pages multiple times to really understand what he intended. Maybe that speaks more negatively about me than the book, ha, who knows. Either way, I would recommend this for fans of BLACK MIRROR for sure.