The Silence - Don DeLillo

 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.

Libra - Don DeLillo

 Libra (1988) is Don DeLillo's version of the Kennedy Assassination conspiracy.   Primarily, it is the Oswald story with a background narrative of various conspirators who draw him into their network, largely to cover themselves over the Bay of Pigs fiasco.   The conspirators include CIA agents, Guy Bannister associates, and most compelling of all David Ferrie, the alopecia-victim who knows them all.   A third narrative strand is the recruitment of Jack Ruby by mobsters who want the Oswald problem to go away.   Was Oswald just a patsy?   Let's settle for not entirely.

It is really well done - this story is so compelling, it's hard to see how any retelling can fall short.   Oswald is well drawn.   One problem, which is historical, though I only realised it on reading this, is that he was so young (only 24) and yet his backstory is so crammed with incident: marine, Russia, verious short term jobs, Marina, two kids, the attempt on General Walker...   I hadn't realised, either, how recently he had started work at the Book Depository.

Other than Oswald, Ferrie is the standout character in Libra.   DeLillo makes him splendidly creepy.   The night he tries to seduce Oswald will live long (and vividly) in my mind.   The making of the novel, though, is DeLillo's signature style, somewhere between Norman Mailer and James Ellroy, with dialogue, I feel, superior to both.   Brilliant - the best DeLillo I have read thus far.

Running Dog - Don DeLillo

Running Dog (1978) is a relatively early DeLillo novel.  It is redolent with post-Watergate paranoia in which mysterious corporations war with alternative entrepreneurs but both, fundamentally, seek the same thing, control of assets.  The nature of the assets matter little.  Everyone and everything is corruptible, which DeLillo demonstrates by anchoring his story on an asset which, in itself, could not be more corrupt or corrupting: a film believed to feature footage of Hitler and his entourage having orgies in the Berlin bunker as the Russians close in.

DeLillo deploys a number of principal characters, all of whom pay a price for their involvement in the quest.  The second rank characters, corruptors all, pay no price whatsoever.  This is their world and in it they flourish.  Albeit Running Dog sounds like a polemic, the characterisation is so accomplished that the message never supplants the medium.

I've had a long but sporadic relationship with the novels of Don DeLillo.  I always enjoy them but never seem to seek them out.  This was the same.  I picked it up by chance and enjoyed it on every level.  I commend it to you.