The Silence by Don DeLillo review – the machine stops

Planes go down and screens go dark in this slim apocalyptic tale from a master stylist

At some point in the editorial process, a rogue line crept into The Silence. The sentence was about airports, masks and Covid-19, and it all seemed thrillingly current, except that Don DeLillo didn’t write it. “Somebody else” may have wanted the book to seem more contemporary, he said in an interview with the New York Times. “But I said: ‘There’s no reason for that.’ So they took it out again.”

And now, I am filled with uncertainty, perhaps even a little bit of dread. Who could do such a thing? Are we sure it wasn’t the Russians? Was it a bot? Is there a virus now infecting new novels with lines about The Virus? Did society itself, in some communal electronic impulse, write this novel while he was sleeping (while we were all, let’s face it, sleeping), because that is the kind of thing that happens in a DeLillo novel, part of his world – which is also our world, by the way – of “cyberattacks, digital intrusions, biological aggressions”. What is the difference between the author and the machine, between the machine and “the mass mind”, and what happens when all that merges and dies, at the same time?

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