Don
DeLillo’s
Event
Horizon

But as with the last, anticipation gave way to the same old, same old: the National Football League’s special mélange of geriatric veterans, big trucks, and big bodies. Even the halftime show seemed to inspire more for its potential—and then, ultimately, counterfactual—special guests rather than its headlined performers. We talked through all of it, chattering, chewing, drinks set here and there in a way that would have me discovering empty cans of Claw and Lite days later.

For the uninitiated, DeLillo is the premiere “writer’s writer”—or at least one of the last few standing—the sort of author who, when told by an interviewer that he is a “writer’s writer,” describes himself instead as “someone who writes sentences and paragraphs.” He maintains a mystique seemingly absent from a literary world that wouldn’t let a pandemic kill off the cross-country book tour, now brought to you by Zoom.

DeLillo’s words are, by comparison, infrequently found outside his books, most of them fiction and most of those novels. He retreats—that is, lives his life (“I’ve been called ‘reclusive’ a hundred times and I’m not even remotely in that category,” he told the Washington Post in 1992)—and returns with new language, reconstructing sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph true-feeling motifs about how all of this works.

DeLillo is a novelist in a sense of the profession that seemed to only have existed for a short while—that is, the professional literary novelist—yet has spawned rich heritage in stereotype. “White Noise,” a short story by Emma Cline, appropriates its title from the 1985 campus novel that put its author on the map. In Cline’s story, a Hollywood executive named Harvey—no last name given, no last name necessary—has an encounter with a man he believes to be Don DeLillo, and thus envisions a “comeback” engineered by the masterful adaptation of “the unfilmable book,” White Noise. Harvey may not know anything about the book, “But he knows who Don DeLillo is,” says Cline in an interview with The New Yorker’s Willing Davidson about the story, “[he] understands vaguely the cachet of Don DeLillo, and imagines being attached to a canonical writer as a form of social and professional protection, a tactical chess move.” In his fall from grace, Harvey reflects, “there was a moment when people no longer returned his calls,” yet still others, “rushed to fill the void. Came to his Super Bowl party…”

It was only a coincidence that The Silence, DeLillo’s seventeenth novel, completed just shy of the pandemic according to its copy, arrives at the dawn of football’s for-now decline. Contrary to its hype, the Super Bowl favors its agnostics. Even the people who evade its Gatorade-soaked embrace tend to do so with a no less evangelical fervor, unable to enjoy their alternate programming without at least one cheap aside about the game of “sports ball” happening elsewhere, which is everywhere. Like any true American pastime—not the baseball nobody watches, but the racism and the riots—you are in it whether you want to be or not. It was only inevitable that DeLillo would slip into the cultural event that offers, as he told Rafe Bartholomew in 2011, the “sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.”

DeLillo would be drawn to this scenario, a room of people—multiplied by millions—magnetized by the Big Game. Much of his works are preoccupied with what could be called mass conspiracies, or more plainly, ideology, in the Althusserian sense. If this sounds like all novels, then DeLillo has a not insignificant number of those to his name, narrating America’s atmosphere through various set pieces—athletics, government intelligence, academia, cults, business—with an agitated pessimism inherited not only by the industry of literary literature, but our idea of it.

When it begins, Jim Kripps and Tessa Berens, one of two married couples in the novel, are above the Atlantic. They’re flying from Paris to the United States, more specifically Manhattan, and most specifically to a Super Bowl LVI party. (For those keeping track, this places us in the year 2022.) They are properly agnostic about their destination: She, a person of some sort of color (“dark-skinned” with “Caribbean-European-Asian origins”), is bored by the upcoming game and the current flight in equal measure. “In another life she might be interested,” says the narrator, but in this one, she “wanted to be where she was going without this intermediate episode.” He, not necessarily white but probably white, forgets who the Tennessee Titans are playing that evening, but it comes to him: “The Seahawks, of course.”

On land, the other married couple, Diane Lucas and Max Stenner, perform the passive ritual of expecting something to happen. “Waiting in front of the super-screen TV,” their stasis is upheld by another, grander ritual—pregame. “Two teams, eleven players each team, rectangular field one hundred yards long, goals lines and goal posts at either end, the National anthem sung by a semi-celebrity, six U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds streaking over the stadium…. Commercials [‘Beer, whisky, peanuts, soap and soda’], station breaks, pregame babble…” The sort of hang-out narration lets one know to expect something will happen, that this scene will turn into a situation.

Lest we be confined to the noises exchanged between intimate partners, or acquaintances, for Diane’s former student Martin, from her days as a professor of physics, is here, too. Diane and Martin are present but not involved, unlike Max, a character who’s invested in the game as an investment, speaking into the air another kind of babble, the over-under. Diana provides his color commentary. Martin is stuck on Einstein. Each is their own own active watcher and passive consumer, if there can be such a thing in a room where football is happening. No matter: the something happens—the screen pulses, a plane crashes, and the television goes blank. A novel ensues.

It is fortunate that DeLillo abandons the Super Bowl after all. Not unlike my boyfriend and I, he is content to delegate some stage managerial capacity to get adult bodies in a space. To be so humorless, the NFL and all its attendant properties—including coaches and players—are a difficult nut for parody. Hypocrisy and hucksterism are not revelations; there is a point at which going on and on about marketing and the like preaches to the choir with its back turned. I’ll know a disturbance has occurred if I don’t see at least five interracial couples jiving to “This Land Is Your Land” on the hood of a Yukon XL speeding down the Pacific Coast Highway. And who can compete with five interracial couples jiving on the hood of a Yukon? DeLillo wisely doesn’t try. Out of the ashes of a diminished object—the Super Bowl—another, more lethal one arrives—a virus. Thanks to what can only be a ninth hour edit, COVID-19 receives an honorable mention, tucked into one of several recitations of everyday catastrophes that stand-in for a contemporary atmosphere.

The Silence squires all of its characters into one flat, and for a time one room, to see what they will make of a fiasco without assistance from the usual meaning-making technologies, broadcast media or anything accessed by a smartphone. For a time, Max is rooted in place, staring at the screen and supplying its language of play-by-play and adspeak in a script reminiscent of this one SNL sketch, part of a trilogy of parodic ads for Totino’s Pizza Rolls. The sketches follow the activities of an unbearably cheery suburban wife on the day of “The Big Game” whose reason for existence, if real life ad spots are to be believed, is to attend to the juvenile gastronomy of, as actress Vanessa Bayer says through a smile, “My hungry guys.” In one sketch, Totino’s benevolently provides a child’s activity set to occupy the wife’s time between rounds of service; in another, she’s sexually awakened by her husband’s friend’s sister, a French woman named Sabine played by Kristen Stewart. In another, the second in the series, the wife’s market spiel is interrupted by the synchronized cheers and moans of her hungry guys—Go go go go touchdown! Aw, fumble! Go go go go touchdown! Aw, fumble! The wife discovers, to her horror, that her hungry guys have been watching a blank screen the entire time. This scene is identical to the devolution of DeLillo’s Max, who chants into nothingness: “De-fense. De-fense. De-fense.” Diane, the wife, retreats to the kitchen—or maybe this is a reverie—for a tête-à-tête with her thirty-something former student who won’t cease reciting keywords of the Anthropocene. Martin, however, is not quite the Kristen Stewart of this Totino’s situation.

The society that sees another Super Bowl, and also, apparently a Super Bowl in the year prior, seems to have gotten the fictional virus under control—“the plague” is “fresh in every memory,” but still, a memory. Once drawn together by one event, now fastened together by another, I could see members of a quarantined household feeling seen by the fragmentary brain muck run amok in a novel that has trapped its characters under false pretenses. The muck takes the shape of Twitter:

Internet arms race, wireless signals, counter-surveillance.
“Data breaches,” he says. “Cryptocurrencies.”
He speaks this last term looking directly at Diane. Cryptocurrencies.
She builds the word in her mind, unhyphenated.
They are looking at each other now.
She says, “Cryptocurrencies.”
She doesn’t have to ask him what this means.
He says, “Money running wild. Not a new development. No government standard. Financial mayhem.”
“And it is happening when?”
“Now,” he says. “Has been happening. Will continue to happen.” “Cryptocurrencies.”
“Now.”
“Crypto,” she says, pausing, keeping her eyes on Martin. “Currencies.” Somewhere within all those syllables, something secret, covert, intimate.

It doesn’t matter who says what to whom. What is the context for all this? I’ve already given it. The context is a blank screen, more than the mysterious calamity that’s caused it. It’s possible the blank screen came first. “From the one blank screen in this apartment to the situation that surrounds us,” says one of the wives. This is not a millennial fear. We killed the television and found something else. Would that we could be so lucky to learn a cosmic event has taken care of the thing I try and fail to do every morning with all these interfaces. Seared nothing has to be better than the present alternative. The Silence says it's already too late, leaving us with lists and scraps of previous knowledge that may or may not be helpful in the world to come, but maybe the event arrives right on time.

Lauren Michele Jackson is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and the author of White Negroes: When Cornrows Were In Vogue & Other Thoughts On Cultural Appropriation. She lives in Chicago.