Waiting for the Plague: A Field Report from

A Review of The Silent History by Eli Horowitz, Matthew Derby, and Kevin Moffett

An interesting contradiction has always sat near the center of The Silent History, a digital-born fiction now released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in print as the joint creation of Eli Horowitz, Matthew Derby, and Kevin Moffett. It’s that it wants to be a novel, quite badly, described on the project’s website as “a groundbreaking novel, written and designed specially for ipad and iphone, that uses serialization, exploration, and collaboration.” The collaborators refer to the text, both on its website and often in interviews, as the equivalent of a five-hundred-page book. The difference between what counts as the book and what counts as the text, and whether either is a novel, is ultimately a crucial one for accounting for either the novelty or the narrative interest of the project. It’s a difference that matters for both print and electronic versions. The Silent History app debuted in October 2012 and released one Testimonial—the primary narrative unit of the text—per weekday in serial format, concluding the full release of the text in April 2013. These gathered Testimonials record the history of a plague, later identified as a virus, that renders the language centers of infants inaccessible from the moment of their birth through their maturation into adults. Like the narrative units of the great nineteenth-century works of serial literature, the Testimonials are self-contained, digestible stories that intertwine with each other to form a more complex whole yet remain internally coherent. As any reader of the great serialists Charles Dickens or Henry James knows, these serialized parts must not only strive for a coherence that will allow them to puncture the print noise surrounding them, but they also must generate ongoing interest (though as readers of Dickens and James also know, techniques for generating such interest can vary greatly). Readers must be willing to pick up the next week’s installment, or in this case, to buy a subscription to the next volume. Many of the serial novelists of the nineteenth century published triple-deckers; often originally serialized, these novels were bound in