If your nerves are raw after months of living under the shadow of a raging pandemic, Don DeLillo’s new novel, THE SILENCE, won’t do much to calm them. In his classic edgy style, he imagines another kind of breakdown in our fragile sense of control, centered this time on technology. But compared to his technicolor masterwork, UNDERWORLD, his latest is a decidedly pallid effort, more premise than execution, and a less eerie vision of the future than offhanded snapshot of our uneasy present.

At barely more than 100 pages, THE SILENCE teeters on the border between novel and novella. Set on Super Bowl Sunday in 2022 (fans of the Seahawks and Titans will be cheered by DeLillo’s prediction of the matchup), it focuses on five characters who plan to gather to watch the game. Jim Kripps, an insurance claims adjuster, and his wife, poet Tessa Berens, are on a flight from Paris to Newark, but they expect to arrive at the New York City apartment of their friends Diane Lucas, a retired physics professor, and her husband Max Stenner, a serious gambler, in time for the game. Joining them is Martin Dekker, a much younger former student of Diane’s, who is obsessed by the work of Albert Einstein.

"If your nerves are raw after months of living under the shadow of a raging pandemic, Don DeLillo’s new novel, THE SILENCE, won’t do much to calm them. In his classic edgy style, he imagines another kind of breakdown in our fragile sense of control, centered this time on technology."

But just as the game is starting, the television screen flickers and goes blank, as do the screens of all the other electronic devices in the apartment. Somewhere over the Atlantic, not long before it’s due to arrive, Jim and Tessa’s plane encounters turbulence and suffers a similar blackout. Along with the rest of the passengers, they survive a rough landing with nothing worse than some cuts and bruises, eventually making their way to their friends’ Upper West Side home.

Is this a China-engineered “selective internet apocalypse,” as Martin suggests, a sunspot or simply a malfunction in the power grid like the ones responsible for the recent New York City blackouts? DeLillo leaves that question hanging, though his epigraph --- Einstein’s observation, “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones” --- strongly hints at where he thinks the answer lies.

DeLillo’s characters’ sphinxlike reflections on the effect of the blackout on people who “live inside their phones” or observations about people in the streets “all escorting each other through the mass insomnia of this inconceivable time” don’t seem especially insightful. Dropping terms like “datasphere,” “dark energy” and “phantom waves” into the mix gives the novel a timely feel, but those oblique references are simply left dangling, as in this passage:

“But the war rolls on and the terms accumulate.
“Cyberattacks, digital intrusions, biological aggressions. Anthrax, smallpox, pathogens. The dead and disabled. Starvation, plague and what else?
“Power grids collapsing. Our personal perceptions sinking into quantum dominance.
“Are the oceans rising rapidly? Is the air getting warmer, hour by hour, minute by minute?
“Do people experience memories of earlier conflicts, the spread of terrorism, the shaky video of someone approaching an embassy, a bomb vest strapped to his chest? Pray and die. War that we can see and feel.
“Is there a shred of nostalgia in these recollections?”

That excerpt provides a fair summing-up of both the novel’s tone and its sensibility. In her new book, EX LIBRIS: 100+ Books to Read and Re-Read, former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani praises Don DeLillo’s talent for describing “the seduction of technology and its ability to magnify the absurdities of pop culture.” And while that gift occasionally flashes here, almost before this potentially terrifying story has begun, it’s over. By the time it concludes, with a series of monologues from each of the quintet of characters, with Tessa asking, “Who is doing this to us?” and Diane musing on this “end-of-the-world movie,” we’re left sitting in our own version of the dark that has descended on them.