The Silence by Don DeLillo

American fiction

Source – Library book

I have been trying ot pop to the local library a little more, get a few books out not always to read, but to just have them there, as I always look for books that have passed me by or I haven’t heard of when looking down the stacks at the library. I am lucky that Chesterfield has a reasonable library with a good selection of fiction so when I spotted this book by DeLillo, which I hadn’t seen mentioned much when it came out, I had reviewed another book by him on the blog, and when Underworld came out in paperback which would be about 1998 I read it for me that is alongside Mason and Dixon is the greatesrt american novel I had read. But I know Delillo has written some novellas. I  read Falling Man a few years ago. So I picked up his last novella to come out.

Words, sentences, numbers, distance to destination.

The man touched the button and his seat moved from its upright position. He found himself staring up at the nearest of the small screens located just below the overhead bin, words and numbers changing with the progress of the flight. Altitude, air temperature, speed, time of arrival. He wanted to sleep but kept on looking.

Heure à Paris. Heure à London.

“Look,” he said, and the woman nodded faintly but kept on writing in a little blue notebook.

He began to recite the words and numbers aloud

because it made no sense, it had no effect, if he simply noted the changing details only to lose

Jim and his wife are in the plane as all this starts

The premise of this book is framed around a group of people who are due to meet for the Super Bowl for a meal and to watch the match. The story starts in Paris with a set of Guests due that evening. Then the action shows the guest in the apartment waiting for a sudden blackout. A moment that causes absolute chaos, and what we get is the thoughts of the five guests, Jim and his wife are on the flight that is due to take them to the evening. Max, the host for the night, is a man who struggles when his access to the screen he is used to stops. Then we have Diane Max’s wife, who is a calming influence on the night’s events. Martin, a student obsessed with Einstein and the Epitaph of the book, is a nod to this, a quote about World War III from Einstein about how that war would be on tech. That is, the five people are viewed in what would happen if all of the sound tech were wiped out. Our depedency on tech these days.

Let the impulse dictate the logic.

This was the gambler’s creed, his formal

statement of belief.

They sat waiting in front of the superscreen

TV. Diane Lucas and Max Stenner. The man had a history of big bets on sporting events and this was the final game of the football season, American football, two teams, eleven players each team, rectangular field one hundred yards long, goal lines and goal posts at either end, the national anthem sung by a semi-celebrity, six U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds streaking over the stadium.

The superbowl is about to start as all this happens  anbd we see how the guerst react.

I enjoyed this; it is one of those what-if moment books, like Javier Cercas’s in his book Blind spot, the unseen action, like her, what is the unseen when there is a cyberattack that wipes out the tech. We have silence, this is what this book deals with, he has taken the Einstein thought on what world war three may be and thought what would happen in those initial seconds after an event like this. I have seen this idea expanded on in the TV drama Zero Day with Robert De Niro, which follows a cyberattack. So one has the events in the apartment when what Delillo calls the silence happens. I liked the use of the Super Bowl, as it is a time when a lot of American families and friends would gather for an event like this. But also in these days of tech, we would have the tv , the phone, a laptop, social media, all going whilst doing this, what happens when all that suddenly is just a blank screen? I liked the way he saw how the different characters all act in one way or another. But the horror outside is yet to be seen! I enjoyed this book, it reminded me I need to go back and read his earlier novels at some date. Have you read any of his early books? Have you read any other book that looks at an event like this happening?