As an oenophile loves wine, Don DeLillo loves words. To read his fiction18 novels and novellas with the appearance of The Silence (Scribner, 117 pages, $22)is to experience a performance of lexical connoisseurship. He appreciates tone, complexity and mouthfeel: Idaho, I thought. Idaho, the word, so voweled and obscure; or asymmetrical, the serpentine word . . . slightly off kilter, with the single additional letter [a] that changes everything. He obsesses over origins: Fascinating, yes. An interesting word. From the Latin fascinus. An amulet shaped like a phallus. A word progressing from the same root as the word fascism. And veneration, as for any devotee, brings about moments of spiritual intensity, a form of sublunary transcendenceFiction, at least as I write it and think of it, he once explained in a letter to a reader, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment.
In The Silence, a word that stands out for its components and cadences and mystical echoes is cryptocurrencies, which two characters repeat to each other as though initiating an esoteric ritual: Somewhere within all those syllables, something secret, covert, intimate. In past books Mr. DeLillo, who is now 83, has mined the lexicons of the military, the corporate world, the hard sciences, politics, sports and consumerism. His focus here is on technology andas is the case with most of his fictionwhat it might look like if the system around it were to collapse.
The book takes place on the night of the Super Bowl in 2022, as a couple, Diane and Max, hosts a small gathering in their Manhattan apartment. Their only guest at first is Dianes former student Martin, a high-school physics instructor infatuated with Albert Einstein. Later their friends, Jim and Tessa, stumble in, having survived a harrowing crash landing on their flight back from Paris. The cause of the accident appears to be the same thing that has plunged the party into bewildered darkness: a massive power outage that has cut off electricity, internet and phone service.
Whether this is a temporary inconvenience or the start of a nuclear holocaust is impossible to guess, as the story is largely confined to the apartment, where the characters speculate on events by candlelight and haltingly carry on with the party. The tension remains somewhat hypothetical. In a foreshadowing scene in the airplane at the start of the book, Tessa remembers a factoid without the use of her phone. She found this satisfying, Mr. DeLillo writes. Came out of nowhere. There is almost nothing left of nowhere. But the blackout enlarges the specter of nowhere, the place beyond the known world of digital mediation. The Silence is about the glimpsethe abrupt, jarring semi-premonitionof a post-technological void.
This all sounds fairly timely and will no doubt burnish Mr. DeLillos reputation as an oracle dispassionately communicating the news from the future. (If youre convinced of his prescience enough to put money on it, incidentally, he has the Seahawks playing the Titans in Super Bowl LVI.) But in my experienceand I have been wrestling with Mr. DeLillos books since I was a teenager, not always sympatheticallythe least rewarding way to approach this author is as some kind of shaman dispensing secret wisdom about the madness and malaise of Americas institutions. To take him too seriously, much less to take him literally, is to inflate him into a portentous crank who has been divining the seeds of decay in every single aspect of culture since the early 70s. Judged on the basis of topicality, The Silence is less than a trifle. It doesnt take a guru, after all, to tell us that were addicted to our devices.
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Fiction: Into the Darkness With Don DeLillo - Wall Street Journal
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