From the National Book Award–winning author of Underworld, a “daring…provocative…exquisite” (The Washington Post) novel about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event. 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 “brilliant and astonishing…masterpiece” (Chicago Tribune) about what makes us human. Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of the Covid pandemic. His language, the dazzle of his sentences offer a kind of solace in our bewildering world. “DeLillo’s shrewd, darkly comic observations about the extravagance and alienation of contemporary life can still slice like a scalpel” (Entertainment Weekly). “In this wry and cutting meditation on collective loss, a rupture severs us, suddenly, from everything we’ve come to rely on. The Silence seems to absorb DeLillo’s entire body of work and sand it into stone or crystal.” —Rachel Kushner

NUBClub split down the middle on this book, with half of the readers hating it and half liking it. The issue centered around the characters. DeLillo sets up a scenario in which five people eventually arrive at a dinner party in the midst of an electronics blackout across the city. The characters have a variety of reactions to this that demonstrate their relationships and speak to some of the themes of our digital age: one character emulating a television sports broadcast while another recites random facts about a work of Einstein. Those who didn't like the book found this really unbelievable and were frustrated by the unrealistic characters and relationships. Nobody disagreed with this assessment of the protagonists, but those who liked the book took the whole thing as an absurdist metaphor on the modern age. Haters could see that, but didn't understand why there needed to be a whole story with characters if it was just going to be absurd. Ultimately, all of us agreed about what the novella was, and all of us thought that DeLillo showed his expected mastery of language, so it wasn't hard to read. We just differed in opinion over whether the use of two couples and a fifth wheel to make an extended metaphor about technology's place in our lives was a worthwhile project. If you consider reading this, just ask yourself if reading a 100 pages of very symbolic characters will bother you, and you'll know if you should take the plunge.