The Silence

The Silence by Don DeLillo takes place on Super bowl Sunday next year, 2022. A retired physics professor and her husband are hosting a Super bowl party in their Newark, New Jersey apartment. One of her former students is there as a guest for the beginning of the game. Another couple who arriving after a vacation in Paris are late to the party.  At the very beginning of the game the television signal is lost. Cell phones and land lines stop working. The electricity goes out. At this same moment the plane arriving from Paris is still in flight over the Atlantic when electrical power on the plane fails but it manages to make a crash landing. The couple survive the landing. After being treated for a head wound, the couple walks to the Super bowl party. The five friends end up staying awake all night, not knowing what has caused this catastrophe. Some suspect it is World War Three. Imagine a world without cell phones. The book is about their conversation that night. They talk about bourbon, about Albert Einstein, and about a telescope in Chile.  This is a strange and ominous novel about an imaginary catastrophe.