This was an impulse purchase during a recent bookshop trip. I had a vague notion that DeLillo is an important author, and this slim and inexpensive book appealed as an introduction. (I bought a second, longer but also inexpensive book, which will be a future read.)
The best word to describe this book is “weird”. Taking place over a single evening and night, we meet five interrelated characters at the start of some cataclysmic failure of technology. In an early Sunday evening in February (the day of the 2022 Superbowl), all electricity and communications go dark. Two people are on a plane at this moment, and they survive the resulting crash; the other characters are at home watching the game when the lights go out. Once all the characters are together, there is a long, convoluted series of speeches by each, reflecting the confusion bordering on madness of a world without online connection.
There is minimal background about the characters – how old they are, how they all know each other. This is perhaps by design, to make these people representative of the larger human population. In fact, we learn more about the unnamed hospital clerk than we do about the main characters; this side character inexplicably tells her life story to the plane crash victims while expounding on the societal vulnerability of our online dependence, a strange voice of specificity in this story of ambiguity.
The book ends without explanation about the communication disruption or any of the next steps or fates of the characters. Again, this is perhaps by design. A global disruption like this would not be understandable in the early hours, and no way of getting information for some time. If the characters are intended to be examples rather than specifics, then their fates are not relevant – it’s likely to be confusing and terrifying for everyone, and the future is incredibly uncertain.
Written before and published in the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic, the story deliberately does not account for or consider that event. Indeed, there was an editorial revision by the publisher to include mention of COVID, which the author insisted be removed before publication, as he had specifically excluded it. He wanted the global situation to be less clear and more of an immediate pulling-of-the-plug. On this one point, I would applaud DeLillo’s diligence about this element of the story, even if he leaves the rest of it too vague for my taste.
Perhaps this short story (it is only 117 small and double-spaced pages) would have been better used as an outline or precursor to a longer work, but apparently not. While there was a lot of potential with the premise of this story, it was very unsatisfying in this presentation. It was impossible to care about the characters or situation as they were so sketchy and incomplete. For example, there is a plane crash that two characters literally walk away from, but no information at all about where and how this happens. There is a sexual relationship of some kind between the wife of the football fan and her student who is part of the group, but it is truly strange and unexplained. Hence the classification of this book as drivel. I wanted to like it, but I didn’t.
Fate: little book library.
18 – short stories (because it is a very short book)
25 – new author to me
38 – drivel
rclr 
Leave a comment