THE SILENCE

DON DELILLO Picador, 126pp £14.99

At 117 pages, Delillo’s 18th novel is more a short story. Many of his earlier themes recur, said Anne Enright in the Guardian, ‘in a pared-down form, illuminating the previous work with an intense, narrow beam’. This is an apocalyptic tale, with, as its central thesis, Albert Einstein’s chilling assertion that ‘I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’

It is 2022 and five people gather in a New York apartment to watch the Superbowl when all digital connections are suddenly wiped out. So, wrote James Purdon in the

Literary Review, ‘they settle down to a night of desultory existential conversation’, with one providing a philosophising moral commentary. ‘It’s as if Delillo has decided to bring Samuel Beckett into the Facebook age,’ wrote Alex Preston in the

Guardian, while Enright agreed that ‘Nobody speaks the way the characters in this novel do — nor are we asked to believe they would.’ Joshua Cohen in the New York Times considered that, ‘About to turn 84 years old, Delillo wants to clarify a universal calamity: mortality. Deprived of technology, humans resign themselves to death, the end of the world, the end of time.’

‘The story ends with no resolution,’ wrote Preston, and it was this, thought Purdon, that made it a short story rather than a novel, given that genre’s propensity to be ‘more tolerant of anticlimax’. ‘Delillo mostly held me rapt,’ wrote Dwight Garner in the New York Times, though he considered it a ‘minor frictionless’ work. ‘In terms of his career, it is not waterfall but spray. Posterity will be kind to him, but it will take relatively little note of this production.’ Maybe small is not so beautiful, after all.