Serious but not Dangerous Don DeLillo

Seriously, is there some question about Don DeLillo as a serious writer? Probably the most common complaint about his fiction has been that it is too serious, too eschatological. Trace "serious" back to its origins, as DeLillo likes to do with words, and you find "heavy." Yes, many of his novels have the weight of formal rigor and stylistic density, and, despite their frequent comedy and wit, sit heavy on the emotions of readers who prefer more optimism about contemporary culture. But the heavy I want to say a few words about here is the burden of being a serious writer for DeLillo. He once joked that he was a "failed ascetic," but for the Catholic-raised and Jesuit-educated DeLillo writing fiction is not just a serious occupation but is like a priestly vocation, a calling he still finds mysterious and compelling. He doesn't write to live, but even in his eighties he does live to write.

By now, because of ABR's publishing schedule, you will have read—if you are interested in DeLillo—plenty of reviews of The Silence, and perhaps even read his unusually frank interview in the New York Times. You may have read the novel months ago and made up your mind about its value—its limited scale (116 pages), its repetitions of DeLillo situations and themes, its relevance to our quarantine days. But if you have been in a literary bubble, here are some basics: The Silence opens in a US bound plane in which a male character takes some comfort from the exact flight information constantly flooding from a screen above his seat. This, we find as we read on, is a synecdoche for normal life. Then the plane crashes, and the communications systems in New York City crash. The man and his wife survive and manage to join three other people in Manhattan for a Super Bowl party on this Sunday in 2022. But the TV screen and the screens on their phones are all dead.

Disoriented, angry, fearful, the characters babble like many DeLillo characters before them—the players and coaches in End Zone (1972), the rock musician in Great Jones Street (1973), numerous characters in Ratner's Star (1976), the boy at the end of The Names (1982), Willie Mink in White Noise (1985), Marguerite Oswald at the end of Libra (1988), the assassin in Cosmopolis (2003), the child on the last page of Zero K (2016). In our 1979 interview, DeLillo said, "Babbling can be frustrated speech, or it can be a purer form, an alternate speech. … Maybe this is why there's so much babbling in my books."

The party host in The Silence, who has "serious money" on the game, tries to fill the silence by throwing the voices of sportscasters (as DeLillo used to do as a kid). His wife alternates between speaking to guests and voicing random thoughts to herself. Her former physics student, an obsessive reader of an Einstein manuscript and not a "man who wisecracks about serious matters," spouts scientific jargon and probable catastrophes like earlier DeLillo savants. The crash survivors try to sleep through the noise surrounding them and then contribute to it with personal stories.

The characters in The Silence are not so much communicating with each other as desperately projecting language into the void left by the death of media—of entertainment, then news. It is no accident that some of the babble, like that in White Noise, is influenced by the media. And as in White Noise, words often come as lists, floating phrases not parts of sentences—maybe another effect of media fragmentation or perhaps an attempt at "alternate speech," more visceral, less syntactical, perhaps primitive.

As reviewers have noted, The Silence is like DeLillo's plays, less about character development and plot than different kinds of linguistic performance. Toward the end, each character has something like a soliloquy, but no one seems to be listening and as in Beckett's Endgame (1957) no one...