“Whenever there’s too much technology”: A Review of Don DeLillo’s The Silence (Scribner, 2020)

In a year punctuated by the global catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic and various other social upheavals, Don DeLillo published his seventeenth novel, The Silence, which––in many respects—can be read as a kind of coda. Novelist Rachel Kushner observes on the jacket blurb that “The Silence seems to absorb DeLillo’s entire body of work and sand it into stone or crystal,” and the book certainly distills many of the prevailing concerns in DeLillo’s previous books: technology and the inherent dangers in its global interconnectedness (Players, Cosmopolis); the compulsive allure of the screen (Running Dog, Libra, Point Omega, Zero K); consciousnessshaping communal experiences (White Noise, Mao II, Falling Man); language as a near-mystical, impenetrable socio-historical meditation (Ratner’s Star, The Names), and sports as a defining cultural moment (End Zone, Underworld). To varying degrees, all of these issues are at play within the narrative of The Silence. The book could also be seen as the third movement of a postUnderworld trio of novellas starting with The Body Artist, followed by Point Omega, and now The Silence, with each book serving as a reflection or extended meditation on the corporeality of grief (The Body Artist), when the concept of a “haiku war” collides with familial loss (Point Omega), and when people are enveloped in the immanence of a global event just beginning to take shape (The Silence). In the case of the latter, the result is a novella of fractures, what occurs off-screen or out of the frame, as the narrative momentum is propelled more by the elisions of the unsaid or undescribed, the “unknown known,” to borrow from former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s (in)famous memo, than by clearly delineated plot points. The action of the novel, minimal though it might be, centers on a seemingly global event, which appears to disable all technology––and Text Matters, Number 11, 2021 https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.28