DeLillo’s latest novel, The Silence, intimately follows five characters grappling with the sudden, mysterious failure of all digital technology and communications during a flight and a Super Bowl gathering. The book explore themes of disconnection, dependency, and what remains of human connection when our technological infrastructure collapses.

Published back in October 2020, the timing of the release could not have been more fitting, and there has already been a lot of good stuff written about the obvious parallels between the dual black swan events of the digital collapse in the book and the pandemic in the real world.

But for me, the real glory in this book is a familiar one from other DeLillo works: he simply gets the small things right.

Small Things DeLillo Gets Right

• The Rigid, Liminal Space of Air Travel – Plane rides have a baren, neutral quality to them. They share a natural forgettability with daily commutes, waiting room magazines, and other absurdities of life masquerading as mundanities. Moreover, DeLillo sees the tiny interior of a plane as being just as restrictive on social behavior as it is on bodily movement–a place where meaningful action is impossible in every sense. There is a cramped feeling to planes that transcends the physical and eliminates certain degrees of freedom, particularly with respect to self-expression:
  

Here, in the air, much of what the couple said to each other seemed to be a function of some automated process, remarks generated by the nature of airline travel itself. None of the ramblings of people in rooms, in restaurants, where major motion is stilled by gravity, talk free-floating. All these hours over oceans or vast landmasses, sentences trimmed, sort of self-encased, passengers, pilots, cabin attendants, every word forgotten the moment the plane sets down on the tarmac and begins to taxi endlessly toward an unoccupied jetway.
(pg. 7)

• The Tricks Screens Play on our Brains – Readers who have previously enjoyed watching DeLillo square off with television in novels like Americana and White Noise will be gratified to watch him take on the iPhone and iPad. If his relationship to the television in his novels is conflicted, celebrating its aesthetic highs while mocking its intellectual lows, his relationship to the 21st century screen is much more straightforward. He hates it. And he’s probably right.
  
  The most disheartening thing about the Information Age is how little of the hourly deluge of information we can hold on to. Screen interfaces have preyed on our brain’s exploratory system, and our environment has preyed on us with screens.
  
  DeLillo makes his brightest example of the most intrusive of screens: the seatback screen shoved in the passenger’s face on every commercial airliner. Under the guise of entertainment, we are bombarded with ads and information so tedious it refuses to stick in our brains–and yet, we cannot look away.

“Find a movie. Watch a movie.”

“I’m too sleepy. Distance to destination, one thousand six hundred and one miles. Time in London eighteen o four. Speed four hundred sixty-five m.p.h. I’m reading whatever appears. Durée du vol three forty-five.”

She said, “What time is the game?”

“Six-thirty kickoff.”

“Do we get home in time?”

“Didn’t I read it off the screen? Arrival time whatever whatever.”
(pg. 8)

• The Incomprehensibility of Disruption – The pandemic taught us first-hand how long the process of acclimation and acceptance can be when fundamental features of our reality are altered. Five years later, there is still an increased awareness of personal space and crowding that was slowly, painstakingly engrained in our minds through the years-long norm of social distancing. We are still not back at ease.
  
  DeLillo’s characters flawlessly portray this human inability to internalize a change whose effects are rationally simple and obvious yet remain indescribable because they are too profound for ordinary language. What they are left with is the empty defeat that comes from being the victim of an unaccountable “act of god”:

“No e-mail,” she said, leaning back, palms up. “More or less unthinkable. What do we do? Who do we blame?”

Gestures barely visible.

“E-mail-less. Try to imagine it. Say it. Hear how it sounds. E-mail-less.”
(pg. 61)

• The Climate of Collective Anxiety – While day-to-day disruption is incomprehensible, we are nevertheless living with a sense of impending doom at all times. The grandeur of civilization–its systems, its codes, its infrastructure–is also its fragility. Against all reason, there is a sense in the contemporary Zeitgeist that we have flown too close to the Sun, that all of this will come tumbling down soon enough. Global warming, nuclear war, rogue AI agents–these ideas are less about a specific point of instability than about there place in a vast and growing collection of instabilities. This dread is beautifully captured in an exchange between Martin and Diane at the end of the book:
  

“All my life I’ve been waiting for this without knowing it,” he says.

[…]

“But didn’t this have to happen? Isn’t that what some of us are thinking? We were headed in this direction.”
(pgs. 103-105)

Conclusion

There are more gems where those came from, despite the very short overall length. As an unabashed fan of DeLillo, I am in some ways a poor judge of his work, but this is certainly some of his best. If you think of it as a novel, you will be disappointed, but if you think of it as a really long short story, you will be thoroughly entertained.

Not recommended for in-flight reading, but highly recommended in virtually all other circumstances, especially when screens are omnipresent and disaster seems inevitable.

Rating: 8/10