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Five characters attempt to deal with a digital shutdown in New York in DeLillo’s strangely heartless novella
It’s not coincidental, I think, that two major novelists have published books this year in which Albert Einstein plays a prominent role. In Ali Smith’s Summer, the proto-fascist schoolboy Robert Greenlaw searches for traces of Einstein’s presence in England and, through his reading of Einstein’s work, comes to understand better his place in space and time. Now, in his 18th novel, The Silence, Don DeLillo gives us Martin Dekker, an intense and inscrutable young man who is “lost in his compulsive study of Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity”. Both novels ask us to consider what Einstein would have made of the unique strangeness of our technological world, particularly how the internet has changed our relationship to time.
The Silence opens on an aeroplane. Jim Kripps and Tessa Berens are returning from Europe when their plane drops out of the sky. It’s the first indication of the “communications screw-up” that has caused all technology to grind to a sudden and catastrophic halt. Jim and Tessa escape the crash landing with scratches and – in the strange, dreamlike logic of this slight, surreal novel – make their way to the New York home of Max Stenner and Diane Lucas. The year is 2022 and it’s the day of Super Bowl LVI, when most Americans would be huddled around their televisions. Instead, there’s no television, no internet, and so Max and Diane sit with Diane’s former student, Martin, and wait. Jim and Tessa arrive, the day passes, Martin quotes Einstein. The story ends with no resolution, and little explanation as to what has caused the shutdown. Continue reading...