By Don DeLillo

Picador 128pp £14.99

The Week bookshop £11.99

Don DeLillo’s slim new novel begins inside a passenger jet in 2022, said Claire Allfree in the London Evening Standard. New Yorkers Jim and Tessa are returning from a holiday in Paris, when suddenly the screen in front of Jim goes blank. The scene shifts to the apartment of their friends Max and Diana, who are expecting to watch the Super Bowl. “The giant TV screen turns grey and silent”, and Diana can’t get her phone to work. A “mass electrical wipeout”, it emerges, has suspended communication – bringing normal life to a halt. Having miraculously survived their emergency landing, Jim and Tessa make their way on foot to Max and Diana’s apartment, where they sit around staring at the blank screen and talking “like characters in a dystopian Chekhov play”. Although is “minor DeLillo”, it’s still an “uncanny” work from a writer who has long “given voice to America’s deepest fears about the future”.

On the contrary, DeLillo’s feted abilities as a seer seem to have deserted him here, said Jon Day in the FT. His vision feels clichéd and “indistinct”, and there’s a sense of “belatedness” to it. His characters talk about technology in an oddly old-fashioned way: “Activate your tablet,” Tessa commands Jim. It’s missing the point to look for realism in DeLillo, said Anne Enright in The Guardian. His characters don’t talk like normal people, but they are “compelling and human” all the same: their voices have a “ritualised urgency”. feels prescient. “As we all learned during lockdown, apocalypse is not always interesting”: large parts of it involve sitting around doing nothing. DeLillo has got it right again.

The Silence

The Silence