Author of the week

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo doesn’t live in the same world as the rest of us, said David Marchese in The New York Times. The 83-yearold New Yorker rarely looks at a computer screen and doesn’t use a cellphone. Not that he opposes the technology. “I don’t use a cellphone,” he says, “because I want to keep thinking in a traditional manner.” For the author of White Noise and Underworld, a writer celebrated for summoning the darker currents of American life, that means sitting at a secondhand typewriter he bought in 1975 and tapping out a single paragraph per page—allowing him to see clearly the visual connections between letters and words. Smartphones, he says, have made people less meditative— which doesn’t particularly trouble him. “I don’t necessarily long to go back to precomputer days,” he says. “I accept what we have and in many ways I’m astonished by it.”

But he is willing to shut the whole cyberworld down, said Rachel Cooke in TheGuardian .com. In his short new novel, The Silence, power grids around the world go dark on Super Bowl Sunday 2022, leaving the main characters with blank screens and no way to learn what’s happening. Even by DeLillo’s standards of prophecy, the book’s timing is “extraordinary”: He wrote it before the world shut down, but describes his characters as still unsettled by a plague that had recently emptied Manhattan’s streets and filled the hospitals. The story feels “horrifyingly relevant,” as panic spreads and it becomes imaginable that we can better endure a pandemic than the loss of our phones. Can DeLillo actually see our future? “Well, let’s see what happens in two years,” he says. “I hope it doesn’t happen.”