The Silence by Don DeLillo

Published by Scribner on October 20, 2020

Reasons for fear multiply every decade. Bioweapons. Nuclear weapons. Genetic warfare. Satellite surveillance and cellphone tracking. An overheating Earth. Microplastics in our air, water and food. The characters in Don DeLillo’s The Silence consider multiple sources of fear as they try to explain the inexplicable. Has time collapsed? Have our minds been digitally remastered? Is human existence “an experiment that happens to be falling apart?”

What exactly has taken place in the near-future (2022) setting of The Silence is unclear. A power failure silences televisions and brings the world to a halt, but what caused the power to fail? Sunspots? An electromagnetic pulse? An alien invasion? If we are all living inside a form of virtual reality, perhaps someone pulled the plug. Or the newfound silence might portend the stilling of normal experience, “a deviation in nature itself.” One character asks, “Is this the casual embrace that marks the fall of world civilization?”

The relatively brief story follows a handful of characters. Jim Kripps and his wife Tessa Berens are on an airplane, talking about the randomness of human memory (as opposed to the completeness of digital memory) while Jim reads aloud the flight data from a monitor — “Filling time. Being boring. Living life.” The plane crashes, apparently while landing, although Jim is upset that they missed the pre-landing snack. Tessa remembers that they were “sort of floating” as the plane came down and Jim remembers banging his head on the window, leaving him with a minor injury. An ambiguous van transports them to an ambiguous clinic where Jim gets ambiguous treatment for the cut on his head. Perhaps to celebrate still being alive — if they are — Jim and Tessa duck into a restroom for a quickie. Others who enter the building have their own stories: stalled elevators, an abandoned subway, barricaded storefronts. Building employees have no explanations — they are there to stitch wounds, not to answer questions — and they surely don’t have a better understanding of “the situation” than anyone else.

Jim and Tessa were planning to join Diane Lucas and Max Stenner for the Superbowl. Martin Dekker has dropped in on Diane and Max, although he does not seem to be an entirely welcome guest. Diane taught physics before she retired and Martin is her former student. When the television screen goes dark, Max surveys their neighbors and reports that they are not blaming the Chinese for the power outage. The implication is that Max might. It seems the absence of evidence will not stand in the way of conspiracy theories that are growing in the street, although without the internet, they need to spread from mouth to mouth.

Martin channels Einstein while Max adds color commentary to the game that has disappeared from the screen. Diane wonders if the game is still unfolding in Deep Space and only Max is attuned to it. Whatever the cause, Diane is happy to see Max so animated after so many years of watching him become one with the television.

Reading The Silence reminded me of watching Lost on television. I loved the characters while I wondered about the explanation for the story’s strange events. Early on in The Silence, I thought “maybe these people are all dead and not yet prepared to enter Heaven.” That would be even more disappointing coming from Don DeLillo than it was coming from the writers of Lost. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. (I have to say, though, I was a fan of the writing on Lost until the writers wrote themselves into a corner from which they couldn’t escape.)

Characters ponder explanations for their surreal present. Martin wonders if the Earth has entered a makeshift reality, a “future that isn’t supposed to take form just yet.” Tessa suggests this might be “some kind of a living breathing fantasy.” She asks: “What if we are not what we think we are? What if the world we know is being completely rearranged as we stand and watch or sit and talk?” But what has happened and why is something DeLillo chooses not to reveal. Perhaps he means to tell us that speculation about possible causes of a consequential event (like a pandemic) can become more important than the actual cause. Or perhaps his point is that the best use of a disaster is to reflect on how little we understand about our own existence.

The story is certainly open to interpretation. It seems in part to be a commentary on the role that technology plays in life. The more advanced we are, the more vulnerable we become. When facial recognition systems go down, how can we be sure of our identities? How does one respond to a loss of the systems that drive modern life? Should we be philosophical or should we concentrate on the concrete: “food, shelter, friends, flush the toilet if we can? . . . Touch, feel, bite chew. The body has a mind of its own.”

Martin reminds us that Einstein thought the next war would be fought with sticks and stones. Are we prepared for that possibility? Martin has difficulty thinking without reference to two-factor verification and gateway tracking. When he pronounces, “The world is everything, the individual nothing,” Max can only stare into the blank screen that once brought the Superbowl into his living room. Without a connection to the world, perhaps we have nothing. How can we survive without our cellphones and email to sustain us? How do we know our place in the world if we don’t know who won the Superbowl?

Having centered White Noise around “an airborne toxic event,” DeLillo is no stranger to fictional disasters. While White Noise is a dark comedy, I was never sure whether I was meant to laugh at The Silence. Characters have conversations that are amusing, primarily because the topics are unexpected, but the humor that lightens the darkness in White Noise is largely absent from The Silence. On the other hand, it is never clear whether the power failure in The Silence is the harbinger of darkness to come or a temporary glitch. That uncertainty prevents the novel from being categorized as dystopian.

This is a shorter and less ambitious novel that most of DeLillo’s work, but the style is vintage DeLillo — every word carefully chosen, every phrase a perfect encapsulation of beauty, every sentence infused with raw energy, every paragraph a surprise. Readers might want to pull The Silence off the shelf every now and then to see whether a fresh reading will unlock new meanings. Few writers encourage me to revisit their work in the hope of undiscovered rewards, but DeLillo is one of them.

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Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow

Published by Tor Books on October 13, 2020

Attack Surface is a near-future novel of ideas. Science fiction is supposed to be the literature of ideas, but quite a bit of it, while fun, is shallow. There’s nothing shallow about Cory Doctorow. When he isn’t writing science fiction, he writes penetrating essays about intellectual property and electronic surveillance. He’s an activist, a blogger, and a celebrated author of speculative fiction that often explores threats to privacy in a digital world.

Attack Surface is set in the same future as, and has some characters in common with, his novels Little Brother and Homeland. Both of those novels have a creative commons license so you can read them for free, but Attack Surface is a standalone that doesn't demand an acquaintance with the earlier books.

Attack Surface tells a timely story about the struggle for justice. But worthwhile fiction reflects themes through characters, so Attack Surface is also about the protagonist’s struggle to become a better person — a person she can live with and might even take pride in being. The novel suggests the possibility of redeeming bad choices by making good choices. Redemption doesn’t erase the pain we cause others — as one character observes, life isn’t a double-entry bookkeeping system that allows ethical debt to be canceled by good deeds — but regretting the past should not be an obstacle to moving forward on a better path.

The story involves two competing corporations, Zyz and Xoth (they both hired the same branding company), that provide technology and strategy to American law enforcement agencies and foreign dictators. The technology enables a surveillance state and crowd control. Used maliciously, the technology permits its users to take control of self-driving cars and direct them toward swarming protestors. The malicious use of such power is likely inevitable, or so the protagonist concludes.

Through his characters, Doctorow warns of the risk that governments and/or powerful corporations can take over the microphones and cameras on cellphones and computers, track the movement of people who carry them, spoof cellphone towers with drones to identify everyone who attends a protest, and yes, hack self-driving cars and every other bit of wired technology, from your Alexa to your smart refrigerator. And he makes it clear that there’s not a damned thing you can do, from a technology standpoint, to protect yourself from it. Reading books like Attack Surface is scary but necessary.

The plot follows the present life of a young woman named Masha while revealing her backstory in time-jumbled scenes that eventually cohere. Masha was a bright and deliberately underachieving student who had a strong grasp of internet technology. She went to work for Homeland Security, excusing her contribution to the surveillance state with self-assurances that patriotism can’t be bad. The lure of money and patriotism took her to Xoth Intelligence and its rival Zyz. Her work took her to Iraq and to Central America before she was assigned to help the dictatorial government in Slavstakia stifle dissent. Masha tried to balance her tech support for oppression by giving aid and comfort to the dissenters.

Back in America, where Zys is handing the techniques of oppression to the Oakland Police Department and is hoping to score a similarly lucrative contract with San Francisco, Masha is blackmailed by Xoth, a company that portrays itself as a more ethical provider of systems that help the police control and spy upon the populace. While trying to cope with corporate superpowers, Masha uses her free time to help politically active friends shield themselves from surveillance, an effort she knows to be futile. The friends believe in her inner decency despite her decision to work against their interests in her various jobs.

The importance of friendship, in fact, is a key theme of Attack Surface. Masha gets through life by compartmentalizing. Don’t get too close to anyone and you don’t get hurt, she thinks. By the novel’s end, she begins to realize that putting friends in compartments only denies pain by denying love. Not just love of friends, but the larger love of humanity that helps us stay human.

Reading a Cory Doctorow novel leaves the reader with a lot to unpack. The world is complex and getting more complex every day. Doctorow cuts through the noise to caution us about trends that are changing the world in ways that will leave most of the next generation with considerably less privacy than we have been able to enjoy.

Attack Surface invites the reader to ponder serious issues: Cutthroat corporations that act in their own interests to the detriment of everyone who lives outside the upper echelons of the corporate bubble. The government’s use of private sector contractors to violate laws so that the government can pretend to have clean hands. The increasing tendency of police departments to conduct unlawful surveillance and justify their actions as necessary to fight domestic terror. The use of social media, not exclusively by Russians, to interfere with democracy. The importance of unrelenting activism to hold the forces of oppression at bay.

The novel also asks hard questions. Is surveillance technology ethically sound when a government uses it to control white supremacists? The technology might save lives, but what happens when white supremacists take over the government and use that same technology against their enemies? Perhaps the way to control white supremacy is not through technology but through empowering people to stand up against it.

Masha’s moral and ethical journey makes compelling fiction, but the story’s urgency lies in its reminder that most of the events in the novel could take place tomorrow. Attack Surface is compelling fiction because of its importance and a fascinating read because Doctor is such a convincing storyteller.

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Jeeves and the Leap of Faith by Ben Schott

Published by Little, Brown and Company on October 13, 2020

Jeeves and the Leap of Faith is Ben Schott’s second homage to P.G. Wodehouse. It is, I suspect, the first Jeeves novel to end with a cliffhanger. The hanging question involves romance, and for once the question isn’t how Bertie Wooster will escape an impending engagement. In fact, Bertie deftly avoids romantic entanglements throughout the novel, with the able help of Jeeves.

As fans of Bertie Wooster well understand, nothing good comes of having an English aunt. They are given to arranging unwanted marriages and scolding, reacting to poor displays of posture and manners with swift correction and responding to tardiness with “What time do you call this?” They live in a place of their own invention where standards are kept and stations are known. Bertie plainly does not occupy that realm. At Oxford, Bertie was more admired for night climbing than for scholarship (night climbing: a sport involving the scaling of old buildings that school administrators wish to discourage despite its venerable tradition). In the present, Bertie banters with his friends at the Drones Club, gambles on unlikely competitions, ponders crossword clues until Jeeves suggests an answer, experiments with hangover cures, haggles with Jeeves about clothing and wallpaper choices, and does his best to avoid being productive.

This book has more of a plot than the typical Wodehouse Jeeves novel, in that Schott focuses part of the story on Jeeves’ role as a clandestine agent of the British government. Fortunately, the plot does not distract the reader. The Wodehouse books were, like Bertie Wooster’s life, delightfully aimless, and Schott again captures Bertie’s essence. Still, as a service to the government, Bertie does impersonate a man of the cloth (making rather a bungle of the prayers) and tests his night climbing skills, culminating in a leap between buildings to which the title alludes.

The novel takes us to the racetrack in the hope that the Drones Club (with the help of Jeeves) can pay its back taxes with a well-placed bet. Other eventful moments largely involve romance (or the lack thereof). Bertie conspires to avoid the latest match contrived by his aunt while various friends and enemies pursue a confusion of women, including a maid who is apparently an old flame of Jeeves. The same aunt has been trying to convince Bertie to discharge Jeeves, so another scheme must be concocted (with Jeeves’ help) to avoid calamity. A diamond heist lurks in the background.

Schott has given intense study to Wodehouse and his characters, as is evidenced by the extensive notes he appends to the text. For the casual reader, it suffices to understand that there is little distance between Schott’s version of Bertie and Jeeves and the originals as crafted by Wodehouse. The writing style and dialog are much the same, as is the flavor of the stories. The plot, such as it is, is light and silly and full of the digressions that characterized Wodehouse’s work.

The Wodehouse novels are celebrated as some of the best comedic works of the first half of the twentieth last century. I suspect that most Wodehouse fans can’t get enough of Bertie and Jeeves. Thanks to Schott, the Jeeves well has not yet run dry.

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A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin

Published by Little, Brown and Company on October 13, 2020

The venerable John Rebus has a pulmonary disease that impairs his ability to climb stairs, but he isn’t letting retirement or disability stop him from solving crimes. In A Song for the Dark Times, his daughter Samantha is under suspicion for murdering her ex-lover. Some of the drama comes from Samantha’s fear that Rebus, who was never the best of fathers, suspects she’s guilty but is trying to protect her anyway. That fear might be legitimate, but regardless of his motivation, Rebus encourages the police to keep an open mind rather than pinning the murder on the most obvious suspect.

The murder victim is Keith Grant. He is the father of Samantha’s child and was her partner before she began a fling with Jess Hawkins, who is associated with a group that some describe as a New Age cult. Grant had been investigating the history of Camp 1033, one of several internment camps in Scotland that were used during World War II to house and abuse people born outside of the UK. Since Grant’s laptop was stolen (but not his wallet), Rebus wonders if the questions Grant asked about a long-ago death at the camp might be connected to his murder. Alternatively, he wonders if it might be connected to the cult or to the land that the cult and nearby camp occupy.

Meanwhile, Siobhan Clarke is trying to solve the murder of Salman bin Mahmoud. whose father “is worth squillions but thought to be under house arrest somewhere in Saudi Arabia.” Salman has been splashing his money around and emulating his hero, James Bond, in an effort to attract women. Salman’s involvement in a shady investment scheme might have something to do with his demise. The two murder investigations, as is usually true in thrillers with multiple killings, might be linked, but whether and how that could be true is for the reader to ponder.

A subplot involves ACC Jennifer Lyons, whose career with Police Scotland might be jeopardized by photographic evidence that her husband is cheating on her. The criminal who has those photos, Morris “Big Ger” Cafferty, contacts Malcolm Fox to act as an intermediary with Lyons regarding a proposition that might be regarded as blackmail.

Ian Rankin keeps the various plots in motion with his usual flair. He brings a number of supporting characters to the table, ranging from families of Germans who were held captive in Camp 1033 to a bar owner and locals who reside near the camp, from aristocrats doing business with Salman to police officers who butt heads with Rebus as he intrudes on their investigation. Rankin gives each character a unique and believable personality.

Rebus has always been portrayed as a character with a strong sense of justice — as he defines it — and an inability to play by the rules if the rules get in his way. The risk that Rebus will frame an innocent person to save his daughter lurks in the novel’s background, adding another spot of darkness to his blemished character.

The overlapping plots are complex but Rankin’s internal summaries keep the details fresh in the reader’s mind. While the solutions to the two murders are less than obvious, Rankin doesn’t strain credibility to produce surprising resolutions. Each plot thread is convincing, while the story as a whole is reasonably suspenseful. In short, A Song for the Dark Times delivers exactly the kind of murder mystery and strong characterizations that fans of Rankin’s twenty-something Rebus novels have come to expect.

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Cuyahoga by Pete Beatty

Published by Scribner on October 6, 2020

Cuyahoga revives a tradition of American storytelling: the tall tale. Impossible deeds and thrilling contests. Remember Paul Bunyan digging the Grand Canyon with his axe and eating more pancakes than the other contestants combined? Big Son is the new Paul Bunyan.

Cuyahoga is the story of two brothers, Big Son and Medium (“Meed”) Son, but Big is the character of legend. Unlike Paul Bunyan, Big has no ox, although a well-loved ox named Asa plays a role in the story. Like Paul Bunyan and John Henry and Davy Crockett, Big’s improbable deeds remind us of a time when the American frontier was wild and untamed, a time when Americans looked to wild and untamed characters for inspiration.

Big helped settle the land that lies to the west of Cleveland, across the Cuyahoga. “The first settlers found the place full of discouragements, such as mosquitoes, ague and poorly behaved wildlife wanting chastisement.” Big cleared the forest in record time and used the timber to build the houses that became Ohio City. When a lake objected to the settlement with storms and shipwrecks, Big brawled the lake and taught it a lesson. Tales come no taller than those that are told about Big Son.

Meed narrates Cuyahoga, telling us early in the novel that the stories of Big are “mostly” true, “simple and moral, easy to grab, the better to encourage someone over the head with.” Meed assembles tall tales about Big into an almanac that satisfies the American thirst for exaggeration. Yet the almanac doesn’t tell the whole story. Meed feels brotherly love for Big but — drawing on another book of tall tales — Meed also tells a Cain and Abel story of resentment.

Big and Meed both feel a desire for Cloe Inches, but Cloe has a tendency to run off when pressure begins to build. Perhaps she represents the first stirring of women’s liberation, or simply the American desire for freedom. Being chained to a life of domesticity clearly isn’t for Cloe. Although Cloe tells a competing suitor where her heart lies, adventure seems to be her heart’s true yearning.

The conflict that drives the plot splits the residents of Cleveland and the newer Ohio City: how many bridges, if any, should span the Cuyahoga to connect the old and new cities? When Cleveland builds a bridge, it charges Ohio City residents a toll to go back home (and charges an extra penny for peanuts), so one bridge is not the answer. Some people think that blowing up that bridge is the answer; others think a second bridge would solve the problem. In 1937, a new solution arrives after the other alternatives fail.

A key theme of Cuyahoga is the American character. Meed tells us that it favors “motion above nearly everything else.” Hence the need for bridges and steamboats, the desire to keep expanding the nation, “to move toward every compass point, always.” Betting on chance, whether in “rastling” contests or by starting a business, is another component of the American character.

Uneducated eloquence describes the voice in which Cuyahoga is told. In part because of Pete Beatty’s ability to link words into unexpected sentences, Cuyahoga coaxes guffaws and belly laughs that break up a steady stream of chuckles and grins. I particularly enjoyed the dentist who treats teeth with creosote and tells patients not to smoke for a few hours, lest they set their mouths on fire.

Near the novel’s end, Big swims in a race against his rival’s steamboat, human strength versus machine power, one of the enduring themes of American folklore. Tall tales represent the spirit of America, the struggle to defeat long odds, to overcome formidable obstacles and achieve unattainable goals, to become the master of one's fate. While Cuyahoga gives a modern twist to the tall tale, Big Son is a worthy addition to the tradition of larger-than-life American folk heroes.

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