The Silence: A Novel

Product Description

From one of the most dazzling and essential voices in American fiction, a timely and compelling novel set in the near future about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event.

Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of Covid-19.
The Silence is the story of a different catastrophic event. Its resonances offer a mysterious solace.

It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity.

Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed.

What follows is a dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human. Never has the art of fiction been such an immediate guide to our navigation of a bewildering world. Never have DeLillo’s prescience, imagination, and language been more illuminating and essential.

“Mysterious…Unexpectedly touching…[DeLillo offers] consolation simply by enacting so well the mystery and awe of the real world.”
—Joshua Ferris, The New York Times Book Review

“DeLillo [has] almost Dayglo powers as a writer.” —
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Brilliant and astonishing…a masterpiece…manages to renew DeLillo’s longstanding obsessions while also striking deeply and swiftly at the reader’s emotions…The effect is transcendent.”
—Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune

“Daring… provocative… exquisite…captures the swelling fears of our age.”

—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Review

Praise for THE SILENCE: 
 
“DeLillo . . . creates a powerful rendering of a crowd unified by a terrifying event that defies all available models of comprehension.”
—The New Yorker 
 
“[Readers] will find something poignant and terrible in this strange unbroken silence.” 

—Michael Gorra, NY Review of Books 
 
“[DeLillo] isolate[s] the raw material of the form, the language, through speech fragments and monologues, in the same way a painter might with color … It’s an ability of DeLillo’s both philosophic and poetic, to stare at the familiar thing, to see the familiar new…” 

—Alexander Sammartino, Literary Hub 
 
“DeLillo’s prose is always supple, his gaze into our culture’s black hole as penetrating as ever. Equal parts lush and spare, 
The Silence never settles for easy answers.” 

—Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star-Tribune 
 
“DeLillo’s shrewd, darkly comic observations about the extravagance and alienation of contemporary life can still slice like a scalpel.” 

—Leah Greenblatt, EW 
 
“To read DeLillo is to engage in a process wherein the author’s clarity forces our own…He treats the topical…as a yearning for commonality, mutuality, something to share…He wants to tell us not just what is, but how it feels, and It’s this ability to describe the moment’s emotion that constitutes his genius.”

—Joshua Cohen, New York Times Book Review 
 
“It is in his deft handling of the novel event’s consequences—the space he creates in the wake of disruption—that DeLillo achieves his most profound effects.” 

—M. C. Armstrong, The Brooklyn Rail 
 
“This masterfully written tale is compelling, timely and utterly eye-opening.” 

—Kami Phillips, CNN Underscored 
 
“DeLillo is the premiere ‘writer’s writer’…He…returns with new language, reconstructing sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph true-feeling motifs about how all of this works.” 

—Lauren Michele Jackson, 
Ssense

“The American master’s latest work of fiction…” 

—AV Club 
 
“In this wry and cutting meditation on collective loss, a rupture severs us, suddenly, from everything we’ve come to rely on.
The Silence see