When does a novel with a timely perspective and a resonant subject matter cease to be particularly timely or resonant? Perhaps when the novel in question is the work of a writer who, though much admired for purportedly foreseeing coming trends and emerging national psychoses, has been stuck in stylistic amber for the past several decades.
Such is the case of Don DeLillo, who, with a shrewd eye for the strange features and unnerving substructures of life in the United States, began churning out a series of amusing satirical novels close to 50 years ago, including Americana (1971), End Zone (1972), and Ratner’s Star (1976). Players, a 1977 novel that stands as his first major work, is representative: At its center is an ennui-infected couple called Lyle and Pammy, who, despite their outward normalcy, manage to get themselves involved in terrorism. Almost as distressing, they relate to each other in moderately intelligible half-sentences on the order of “Let me sleep, hey” and “See, look, I’m saying.” As DeLillo explained in a 1988 interview, such dialogue had the patina of authenticity: “It is my theory that if you record dialogue as people actually speak it, it will seem stylized to the reader” — that, or merely abstruse.
DeLillo’s aggressively compacted dialogue was no impediment to future literary success: Beginning with the undeniably rich and entertaining White Noise (1985), he emerged in the public eye as a slightly more accessible and considerably more prolific version of Thomas Pynchon, with whom he shared an interest in conspiracies, collusions, and secret plots of all kinds. The high point of this side of DeLillo was the National Book Award-winning Libra (1988), which has as its center Lee Harvey Oswald, depicted by DeLillo as a patsy in a baroque conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.
Somewhere along the way, DeLillo became addicted to intensely specific descriptions of the detritus of the culture he found himself living in. In the breathless opening paragraph of White Noise, DeLillo cataloged the belongings (the stuff, as George Carlin might put it) carted into dormitories by incoming college students: “The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts.” By the time DeLillo has reached peanut creme patties, toffee popcorn, and Dum Dum pops, some readers will start to have the sinking feeling that the whole book will be like this.
In fact, all of DeLillo’s work is a bit like this, as is his new novel, The Silence. Although the book is being promoted as an unusually prescient work — its promotional copy touts that it was completed just before the advent of COVID-19 and deals with “a different catastrophic event” — it is loaded with the usual DeLillo mannerisms: the sense of protagonists navigating their world as mice might traverse a maze, the dispassionate descriptions of objects and things, and, of course, dialogue that might read to some as snappy but to others as merely monosyllabic.
Simply put, this thin wisp of a book is a rehash of DeLillo’s past work, rather artlessly stuffed with contemporary references. The word “shutdown” even makes an appearance, as do, deep into the book, references to a recent past consisting of “the face masks, the city streets emptied out.”
Set in the menacingly near future of 2022, The Silence opens aboard a commercial airplane traveling from Paris to New York. Among its restless occupants is one Jim Kripps, who distracts himself by repeating flight data visible on assorted small screens: “Arrival time sixteen thirty-two. Speed four seventy-one m.p.h. Time to destination three thirty-four.” Jim is no more engaging when communicating with his wife, Tessa. “Children on this flight. Well-behaved,” Jim says, to which she replies, ominously, “They know they’re not in economy. They sense their responsibility.”
Then comes a calamity: Following some heavy-duty turbulence, Jim and Tessa’s plane inexplicably begins hurtling toward the ground. This chain of events would be alarming on its own, but DeLillo pauses to note an even more dire detail: Remember all those screens Jim was scrutinizing? They’re blank. Hmm.
Meanwhile, at ground level in New York, another couple, Max Stenner and Diane Lucas, are settling in to watch Super Bowl LVI, the broadcast of which is described by DeLillo in terms that suggest the author’s outrage at our consumerist society: “A stream of commercials appeared and Diane looked at Max. Beer, whiskey, peanuts, soap and soda.” The stadium is jokingly said to be called Benzedrex Nasal Decongestant Memorial Coliseum. Inevitably, though, Max and Diane’s screen goes dead, too, filling with weird patterns that suggest a migraine aura. And wouldn’t you know it? The couple’s cellphones, landline, and computer are no longer operational, either. A guest of Max and Diane places the blame at the feet of the Chinese: “They’ve initiated a selective internet apocalypse.”
Jim and Tessa survive their crash landing, but a nation shorn of functioning electronics is a fate worse than death for DeLillo’s technology-addicted characters. In the absence of the Super Bowl, Max takes to adopting the voice of a play-by-play announcer in spite of the blank TV set: “During this one blistering stretch, the offense has been pounding, pounding, pounding.” DeLillo has imagined it all about as well as he presented those possession-burdened college students in White Noise: “Stove dead, refrigerator dead. Heat beginning to fade into the walls.” The word “cryptocurrencies” is repeated and meant to suggest something dark and premonitory, and one character is staggered by the absence of electronic communication: “E-mail-less. Try to imagine it. Say it. Hear how it sounds. E-mail-less.” We are told, “Nobody wants to call it World War III but this is what it is.”
To be sure, the sort of cyberattack DeLillo envisions here would be scary, disruptive, and disorienting, but does it carry the sort of weight the author intends? In fact, the novel’s timing could hardly be worse: For all of DeLillo’s labors, it is hard to imagine that the apocalyptic premise sketched here would lead to the same level of panic or invite the same level of governmental mismanagement as our present pandemic. Despite its apparent timeliness, The Silence is a toothless sort of book. At one point, one character judges another character’s ramblings, his half-sentences and repetitions, as “pretentious nonsense.” You can say that again.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
