The Silence: A Novel

by Don DeLillo

Overview

From one of the most dazzling and essential voices in American fiction, a timely and compelling novel set in the near future about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event.

Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of Covid-19. The Silence is the story of a different catastrophic event. Its resonances offer a mysterious solace.

It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity.

Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed.

What follows is a dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human. Never has the art of fiction been such an immediate guide to our navigation of a bewildering world. Never have DeLillo’s prescience, imagination, and language been more illuminating and essential.

“Mysterious...Unexpectedly touching...[DeLillo offers] consolation simply by enacting so well the mystery and awe of the real world.” —Joshua Ferris, The New York Times Book Review

“DeLillo [has] almost Dayglo powers as a writer.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Brilliant and astonishing...a masterpiece...manages to renew DeLillo’s longstanding obsessions while also striking deeply and swiftly at the reader’s emotions...The effect is transcendent.” —Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune

“Daring... provocative... exquisite...captures the swelling fears of our age.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982164553
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	10/20/2020
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	1,157,603
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.38(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including White Noise, which was made into a Netflix film, Libra, Underworld, Falling Man, and Zero K. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2013, DeLillo was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and in 2015, the National Book Foundation awarded DeLillo its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Hometown:

Westchester County, New York

Date of Birth:

November 20, 1936

Place of Birth:

New York City

Education:

Fordham University, 1958

Editorial Reviews

08/03/2020

DeLillo (Zero K) applies his mastery of dialogue to a spare, contemplative story of a group of New Yorkers and their response to a catastrophic shutdown of the world’s computer systems on the night of the Super Bowl in 2022. While flying back to New York from vacation in Paris, Jim Kripps reads out the plane’s altitude and speed from a screen while his poet wife, Tessa Berens, plumbs her memory for trivial facts and marvels at her ability to recover information without the assistance of a phone. Jim, an everyman whom the author describes as “nondescript,” assumes the worst when the screens suddenly go blank. Their friend Max Stenner, who, with his professor wife, Diane Lucas, and her former student Martin Dekker, anticipate Jim and Tessa’s arrival at their Manhattan apartment to watch the game, is deeply shaken when his own screen goes blank before halftime. Martin entertains Diane by reciting passages from Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity, which lead to alternately profound and tepid discussions of the shutdown, the cause of which remains unexplained even after Tessa and Jim report to the group on surviving their crash landing and a ride through eerie, dark city streets. In the end, readers gain the timely insight that some were born ready for disaster while others remain unequipped. While the work stands out among DeLillo’s short fiction, it feels underpowered when compared to his novels. (Oct)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for ZERO K:

“Mr. DeLillo’s haunting new novel, Zero K — his most persuasive since his astonishing 1997 masterpiece, Underworld — is a kind of bookend to White Noise: somber and coolly futuristic, where that earlier book was satirical and darkly comic. . . . reminds us of his almost Day-Glo powers as a writer and his understanding of the strange, contorted shapes that eternal human concerns (with mortality and time) can take in the new millennium.”
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"One of the most mysterious, emotionally moving and formally rewarding books of DeLillo's long carer... Unexpectedly touching... [DeLillo offers] consolation simply by enacting so well the mystery and awe of the real world... I finished it stunned and grateful."
—Joshua Ferris, The New York Times Book Review

“Brilliant and astonishing... a masterpiece... full of DeLillo's amazing inimitable scalpel perceptions, fluent in the ideas we'll be talking about 20 years from now... ZERO K somehow manages to renew DeLillo's longstanding obsessions while also striking deeply and swiftly at the reader's emotions....The effect is transcendent.”
—Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune

“Daring... provocative... exquisite... captures the swelling fears of our age.”
—Ron Charles, Washington Post

“Mr. DeLillo’s true brilliance has always been as a satirist. Despite its morbid subject, this is a terrifically funny novel.”
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“Zero K is science fiction of a kind that takes place five minutes from now and a novel of ideas that’s deeply emotional.”
—Jeff Baker, Seattle Times

“A profound and deeply moral book.”
—Ann Levin, Associated Press

“Powerful. . . . Zero K may poke fun at life extension, but it gives us the warmest depicture of a DeLillo novel yet at the intimate reason for this perpetual Icarus complex. . . . the most powerful reason for this desire for transcendence is love, and as Zero K so poignantly reminds, love is one element that does not survive at subfreezing zero kelvin.”
—John Freeman, Boston Globe

“Zero K grapples with the fact our demise is profoundly at odds with this aspect of us that years to exceed every limitation. Circling around this irreconcilable dilemma, DeLillo finds a vital dialogue with his great work White Noise. It is this . . . that makes this book a provocative success.”
—Scott Esposito, San Francisco Chronicle

“Anchored in emotions as old and primal as humanity itself: the fear of death, the passionate love of a man for his wife, the conflicted love of a son for his father. These rich veins of feeling flow like an underground river through the novel’s eerie, futuristic terrain.”
—Kevin Nance, USA Today, 4 Stars

“In Zero K, Don DeLillo has found the perfect physical repository for his oracular visions. . . . His vision is ironic, sere, crackling with static like a horror film.”
—Nathaniel Rich, New York Review of Books

"A magnificently edgy and profoundly inquisitive tale."
—Booklist, starred review

From the Publisher

★ 2020-07-14
“Life can get so interesting,” DeLillo writes, “that we forget to be afraid.”

It’s a typically loaded statement from an author who has spent the last half-century navigating the border between fascination and fear. His 17th novel unfolds in such a middle ground. Beginning on a trans-Atlantic jetliner from Paris to Newark that loses power due to a global surge or disruption, it is a small book, precise in its calibration, about what happens when the world we've constructed, with all its technological interventions, goes dark. “Cyberattacks, digital intrusions, biological aggressions,” DeLillo writes. “Anthrax, smallpox, pathogens. The dead and disabled. Starvation, plague and what else?” He may as well be describing the world outside the pages of his book. That’s a tricky point to make because fiction needs to succeed or fail on its own terms, but DeLillo has always had his finger on a more collective pulse. In Players (1977) and Mao II (1991), he explored the aesthetic possibilities of terror; in Underworld (1997), he reimagined history through an individual, as well as a collective, lens. This book doesn’t have that sort of scope or ambition; at just over 100 pages, it's more novella than full-length work. Still, in its account of five characters—Jim and Tessa, who survive the jetliner’s crash landing; Max and Diane, their hosts in New York; and Martin, a former student of Diane’s—this brief, disturbing story gets the sudden breakdown of society exactly right. The date is Super Bowl Sunday 2022, but when the grid goes down, the game is rendered moot. In its place, DeLillo investigates the disconnect between characters who claim to care for one another until disaster hits. The writing is spare and almost playlike, especially in the second section, which concludes with a series of monologues.

This is a small but vivid book, and in its evocation of people in the throes of social crisis, it feels deeply resonant.

Kirkus Reviews