A must for DeLillo completists...but maybe not for the uninitiated. It forms an uneasy trilogy with other post-Underworld shorties.

The Silence by Don DeLillo is a recommended novella about the death of technology.

On Super Bowl Sunday 2022 Max Stenner, his wife Diane Lucas who is a retired physics professor, and her former student Martin Dekker are watching the game and waiting in their Manhattan apartment for another couple, Jim Kripps and his wife, Tessa Berens, to arrive, fresh off their flight from Paris. When all the screens go blank on the flight, it becomes clear that the flight is in trouble. At the same time the grid goes down in Manhattan, rendering the Super Bowl moot. Kripps and Berens survive the crash landing and make it to the apartment through dark streets. There is a discussion about what has happened, but clearly this is a story about the final breakdown of society.

This is a very abbreviated novella with spare dialogue about the capacity of people to handle disaster when all our digital screens going blank and technology ends. Basically, The Silence will cause thoughtful readers to question their ability to survive without all their screens and constant connection to everything and everyone. The cause of this scenario is never explained, but in such a short work the idea is that should it happen, we wouldn't have information right away. There would be no way to find out what happened. We would suddenly have to connect with the people around us.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Scribner .
The review will be posted on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

This book is overly descriptive and I can't foresee where it is going. It mostly definitely isn't Dellilo's best work. It has a certain place in the social media obsessed world but didn't work for me. I think this book was rushed out and doesn't capture what it originally intended to.
DNF-did not finish

It's Super Bowl Sunday 2025. Three friends are in New York watching the game and one couple is flying in on an international flight when everything goes off the Grid. A short novel that is thought-provoking and captures our reliance on the outside. I am a fan of DeLillo.

Copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley

In his latest slim novel, “The Silence” (Scribner), DeLillo attacks technology and it’s domination over every aspect of our existence. The story begins in the near future of February 2022 on a transatlantic flight from Paris to New York. Jim Kripps, a claims adjuster, and his poet partner, Tessa Berens, are returning from a post-COVID vacation to Paris. Jim’s attention is glued to the overhead itinerary map when the plane loses power on its descent into Newark Airport. A crash landing sends Jim to the hospital with a minor head injury, and then the two proceed to uptown Manhattan to join their friends for a Super Bowl party.
Meanwhile, in Manhattan, Max Stenner and his wife Diane Lucas are awaiting Jim and Tessa’s arrival. One guest, Martin Dekker, a bookish physics teacher at a Bronx charter school has already arrived. Martin is a former college student of Diane’s, who is obsessed with Einstein. Max has “big dollars” riding on the Titan-Seahawks game, and is enthralled by the “commercials, stations breaks and pregame babble” on his big screen television.
Then, as DeLillo states “something happened.” At kickoff, the images shake and dissolve into abstract patterns and the screen goes black. The void extends beyond the screen to phones, laptops, and the electrical grid. As the massive power outage interrupts the Super Bowl, our characters’ world descends into silence. Various conspiracy theories are bantered about (a Con Ed mistake, sabotage, an alien invasion), and when Jim and Tessa finally arrive they are just coming to terms with their near-death experience In “The Silence,” DeLillo not only plays upon our paranoia, he amplifies it through the characters’ dialogue and inner monologues. He’s identified our fears and pushes the reader to the limit. “The Silence” is no ordinary blackout. It is a black out on steroids. And it’s coming for you.
Although “The Silence” was written just prior to the current pandemic, the novel is relevant to our present circumstances. We neither understand COVID-19 and it’s present impact upon society any more than Max, Diane, Martin, Jim and Tessa can understand the blackout. Nor can we speculate how it will affect our future. However, DeLillo is hopeful. When questioned about the long term affect of the pandemic during a recent New York Times interview, he responded “We may feel enormous relief, but for many people, it’s going to be difficult to return to what we might term as ordinary...Those ordinary things are going to seem extraordinary.”
Don DeLillo doesn’t write genre fiction, or stories that make the reader feel good. He writes because he has something prophetic to express about culture and our lives. Or about terrorism, financial collapse, or nuclear and biochemical disaster. He writes to make us think so hard that our brains hurt. At the age of 83, and over seventeen novels, DeLillo has summoned the darker currents of our American experience. In “The Silence,” he warns about “the dependence of the mass on energy,” and if readers wise, they’ll heed his oracle to prevent what he terms may be “World War III."
Read my full review at Booktrib.com

This is a very short novel, almost a long short story, involving 5 people preparing to watch the 2022 Super Bowl. One couple is flying in from Paris and crash lands, just as the TV and internet die in the host's apartment. The characters behave and interact in very odd ways to the continuing developments. End-of-the-world scenarios are usually right up my alley, but this one, along with the similarly-themed LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND released earlier this month, left me confused and unsatisfied. Thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for providing an ARC.

Leaving no time for sugar coating, Don Delillo delivers a straightforward, haunting account of a possible future. That being said, I found very little to engage or enjoy here. The author delivers a strong and bold message, but in such an abrupt way that there is very little room for story telling. Perhaps this style is just not for me, though Delillo writes well and I do hope to try his works again.

Thank you to Netgalley for an early copy of this novella.

Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for providing me with an e-arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I really really wanted to like this book. A catastrophic event that wipes out the use of technology sounds like a great premise and I love an encapsulated story (where all of the characters are forced together based on location), but it was really lacking for me. It's not a full novel, but more of a novella/short story. I also had a hard time with the writing style, and overall this book just wasn't for me.

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.

RECOMMENDED

I received an ARC of this title. The premise sounded interesting, but I really didn't enjoy this book. Though it is promoted as a novel, I would classify it as a short story. .

The elephant in the room here is that this is extremely similar to Leave the World Behind which came out 2 weeks ago. It is, no doubt, a sign of the times that the idea of all tech and communication going away is something that we find compelling, enticing, and horrifying. Both books are worth reading.

In this concise novel, DeLillo presents the type of plausible scenario that modern society seems to be hurtling toward. Without technology to support us, how do we communicate to the outer world and with each other? Five characters are faced with such a dilemma and its consequences.

DeLillo's characters grapple to make sense of uncertainty brought about by circumstances beyond their control that have potentially catastrophic results. The inner thoughts and outer demeanor of the group offer an interesting perspective of life in the 21st century.

𝐀𝐧𝐝 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?

𝘐𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘚𝘶𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘉𝘰𝘸𝘭 𝘚𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳 2022. 𝘍𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦, 𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘳, 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.

Something catastrophic has happened but what? The digital tools are failing, screens are going blank, phones, computers, televisions- everything is lifeless. So begins an intelligent discussion, from the distance of wars to the puzzling mysteries of our technology and how it is changing our own humanity. Blackholes, Einstein, and even the Large Synoptic Telescope, calmly the group wonders if they are witnessing the fall of civilization. Calmly. They themselves are on the sidelines in a game that is no longer being played.

It is an interesting, bizarre story- are they meant to seem like dumb animals waiting instead of losing their marbles? Are we all dumb animals with our noses stuck in our devices? I just kept thinking, have you ever watched how people act when they are parted from their phone alone? It’s as if their child has been abducted… I kid, but it’s not completely untrue. So it was hard to imagine that these friends wouldn’t tumble into hysterics. Then again, maybe they’ve convinced themselves it’s nothing… just one of those weird things that will later make perfect sense like a power station failing, rather than a pause in the ‘collective mind’. Educated people don’t lose their grip on reality that easily, do they? They spend all their time speculating, chewing on thoughts, still plagued as we are by the same questions despite our little digital tools- are we an experiment? What makes us human? Are we still human, even if technology fails us? Are we something else without it, with it?

As to the couple on the dramatic flight, Jim and his wife Tessa (a poet), the reader can’t help but see him as restless as a child in comparison to her. “Find a movie. Watch a movie”, she tells him while he anxiously keeps reading the flight stats on the tv screen in front of him. As if tracking the time, location, altitude and all those magical little changing numbers are his anchor to reality. For this, he is the most ridiculously human of them all, his nervous chatter, his fears and Tessa is the logical one, the grown up. Even when she should be scared, is she?

There are provocative questions, ones we have been asking ever since our technology surpassed our understanding, at least for the majority of us. Are we all welcoming this mind numbing reality? Is there something covert happening that we are failing to see, even if it’s right under our noses or at our fingertips.

I don’t know, maybe I didn’t understand what DeLillo was saying or maybe he is telling us we have fallen into some dark hole, that we are all disengaged. This is a very short read that didn’t fully hook me, but it had moments of connection.

Publication Date: October 20, 2020

Scribner

Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for this advanced reader's copy of The Silence by Don DeLillo.

This is the second book that I've read recently which ponders what would happen to us if technology failed. This book, in particular, focuses on a small group of people gathered for Super Bowl Sunday. When the screen goes black, along with everything else, some of the group struggle to carry on as usual and some lose their sense of time and place almost immediately. What would happen if everything that we count on to keep us connected and entertained just went away? It's an interesting question. The Silence gives us a glimpse of the reactions of one small group of friends.

This is a novella and does well at that length. I found myself satisfied with the story as a whole, although a little more character development would have helped me to feel a connection to the characters, rather than just feeling like I was watching a complex drama unfold quickly. Definitely worth a read, especially if you like doomsday scenarios.

A short and punchy novella that causes us to look at an afternoon, a night or perhaps an entire future without our screens at our disposal.

A one-sitting read, this book covers an apocalyptic-type afternoon in your average, all-American apartment building somewhere in New York on Super Bowl Sunday 2022. Suddenly and without any understanding, all electronics go black. One couple - Tessa and Jim - experience a crash landing on their flight from Paris yet they find themselves keeping their Super Bowl plans, eventually finding their way to the apartment of their couple friends - Max and Diane. Diane is hosting a past student of hers, Martin, and what ensues is simply quiet, boredom, wonder and fear.

This novella feels as if you're simply hearing the inner thoughts of these humdrum characters at the very beginning of a giant shift in their world. As I read on, I began to equate the dialogue (talking to themselves, talking out loud about nothing at all, trying to work through their feelings, etc.) to how we seem to communicate through screens today. We share the unimportant, the everyday bore, and we ramble. We try to understand why we feel a certain way and why our lives are what they are by oversharing, reaching out, and asking for advice and commentary.

As a fan of DeLillo, I appreciated how this book made me pause and made me think; however, compared to his other work, I felt that it could have used a bit more atmosphere. The language was true DeLillo - short, punchy, disjointed and conversational, but for my own preference, I enjoy when an apocalyptic type story has a descriptive and colorful atmosphere to really put you into the story. It was also much too short, though I can tell that was done intentionally. Overall, a decent, quick read for fans of DeLillo who want to get their mind spinning in this upside down time we're all living in.

Interesting topic, but it didn't pull me in as much as I thought it would. This one didn't make as much of an impact on me as I thought it would from reading the description. It wasn't a bad read but just didn't connect with me as much.

"Whatever is out there, we are still people, the human slivers of a civilization."

This wee baby story - a novelette-ette, if you will - opens with couple Jim and Tessa as they're mid flight from Paris to NYC. The date is Super Bowl Sunday of 2022, and Jim and Tessa are planning on landing in time to meet up with retired physics professor Diane, her partner Max, and her former student Martin to take in The Big Game. But things go awry when the images on the television screen shake and then turn black, the small party realizes all of their phone screens have also blanked out, and it becomes apparent that some sort of information shutdown has encompassed NYC... and potentially the entire world. We learn that Jim and Tessa's plane crashed at the same time the tv/phones died - and they survived! - but on their journey to join their friends they observed the eerie shell of a city that New York has quickly become due to this... whatever it is that just happened.

But the point of this story is not necessarily the physical events that occurred within the pages - but rather the conversations that the protagonists have with each other and in Martin's case, with himself. The characters speculate what it all means and what will happen next, pretend that the game is still on, talk about Einstein's 1912 Manifesto and his theory of relativity, and speculate if a nap will right the world (spoiler (not really): a nap does not right the world).

This story was far too short to pack the punch that it could have had. The premise was fascinating and the writing was intriguing, but The Silence was a shell of what it could have been if it was instead written as a full blown novel. Also, I found a lot of the conversations that the characters had about what-the-what just happened to be rather self absorbed and, for the most part, not particularly memorable. Additionally, I found the fact that none of these characters panicked or freaked out at such an event to be implausible. I mean, would you really be talking about Einstein and bourbon if you thought the world was ending?

The Silence was a really interesting premise with lackluster execution.

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

-T.S. Eliot

When the information overload ends, and we all are confronted with silence. When our light-emitting bricks go black, what happens? When the instant dopamine smack that technology gives us is taken away, what then?

The Silence is sparse and does not pack the punch that Underworld, Libra, or White Noise does. But Don DeLillo is still at the reigns. He has few peers, if any, when it comes to beautiful prose. The first part of this short novella sets us up with the 5 characters and their situations leading up to and including the “blackout.’ Like a beautiful piece of music, DeLillo pulls you in steadily in the first half and then from the beginning of part two to the end, his prose is in high gear. The characters espouse at each other speculative poetics that range from cryptocurrency to Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the special Theory of Relativity. Sadly, the story is short and I could have read hundreds of more pages. This is a selfish sadness, because I think it is clear that the shortness of the work plays into part of what the novella is trying to impart. The shortness is obviously deliberate and not lazy mistake like some reviewers seem to be insinuating. Compared to DeLillo’s other work, this is about a 3-star read, but compared to contemporary peers, this is an easy 5 stars. I highly recommend this thin volume that can be read in one sitting, easily.

Thanks to Scribner and Netgalley for the advanced copy for a review.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC. I always appreciate the opportunity to read an advance copy, but I just finished this one and have no idea what I just read. It’s more of a short story than a novel and it doesn’t make any sense. Honestly, the blurb is the best part.

Don DeLillo is the perfect observer of America and this novel continues with the cultural analysis found in “White Noise”. Five individuals are brought together for a Super Bowl Sunday 2022 party: Diane Lucas, a retired Physics Professor and Max Stenner, gambler, coach potato and inspector of luxury apartments; Martin Dekker, a loner, a high school physics teacher and ex-student of Diane’s; who are waiting for Jim Kripps, "whose name was a seat number" and Tessa Berens, a poet, flying back to New York from Paris. And then a technological intervention occurs, which drives the five into a search for who they really are. Don DeLillo’s gems sparkle throughout the book, but the book felt like a sketch rather than a completed work of art. The counterpoints are Max, who looks at his blank screen with anger over the inconvenience and Martin, who looks at the stars wondering if Albert Einstein can help him understand. The other characters fill the voids as incidental music to the story; a story where not much happens and all problems begin and end with us.

Thank you NetGalley for allowing me the privilege of reading this Advanced Reader Copy of this novel.