I've reviewed two DeLillo novels previously on this blog, Running Dog in 2015 and Libra in May this year. The Silence is nothing like either of them and yet it is quintessentially DeLillo.
DeLillo specifically calls it a novel but it is really a novella, only 116 pages in huge and beautiful American typewriter font. There are only five characters: Jim Kripps and Tessa Berens, who we find onboard their flight from Paris to New Jersey; and an older couple in their New York apartment, Max Stenner and Diane Lucas, and their guest Martin, who is a physics teacher and Diane's former student. Martin has an obsession with Einstein's 1912 manuscript of The Special Theory of Relativity, which he can and does quote from.
It is Super Bowl Sunday 2022 (but DeLillo wrote the book in 2020) and the game is about to start. Jim and Tessa are due to join the party later. But something happens. The TV blacks out. The same system failure hits the plane. Fortunately the pilot is able to glide in. Motor vehicles still work but all digital systems are down.
There is no resolution - and, of course, in real life we would be able to do nothing in this situation, no matter if our domestic group included a retired physics professor and a savant on the theory of Relativity. The lack of resolution is another trait suggesting this is really a novella or longish short story. Whatever it is, it's damn fine writing.
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