That makes me think of the characters Max and Jim in “The Silence,” who are always looking at screens as a substitute for generating their own thoughts, which a lot of us do these days. Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images

I’d never experienced this before.ĭon DeLillo in 1991. What intrigued you about it? What was intriguing is that I was also compelled to look. I hate when I’m on a plane and realize I’m compelled to keep staring at that screen. So I watched the screen and there was information there like outside air temperature, time in New York, arrival time, speed, etc. There was a screen under the overhead bin. There was also a flight I was on between Paris and New York, and for somewhat mysterious reasons, I made notes. Watching the football game joins us together in one aspect and then looking at a blank screen suddenly is a kind of cataclysmic footnote. Then there was the notion of the Super Bowl, which has been in the back of my mind for some years. What planted the seed? What got me going was the idea of a blank screen. Still, “The Silence” feels attuned to current anxieties. It wasn’t going to stay, that’s for sure.

I’m shocked that an editor or whoever had the chutzpah to jam anything, let alone a Covid-19 mention, into one of your books. But I said, “There’s no reason for that.” Somebody else could have decided that it made it more contemporary. Why did you take it out? I didn’t put Covid-19 in there. Then I was told there were changes to the book and was sent a second galley. In the first galley copy I read, there’s a scene in which a character is reciting disastrous events and mentions Covid-19. Let me ask about something that’s not in “The Silence,” at least not anymore. “I don’t think it’s a question of better or worse. “The way our culture moves along changes the way all of us think,” DeLillo said. They will very likely figure again in regards to his new novel, “The Silence,” in which a mysterious event on Super Bowl Sunday 2022 causes screens everywhere to go blank. His enduring sensitivity to the zeitgeist is such that words like “prophetic” and “oracular” figure frequently in discussion of his work. For nearly 50 years and across 17 novels, among them classics like “White Noise,” “Libra” and “Underworld,” DeLillo, who is 83, has summoned the darker currents of the American experience with maximum precision and uncanny imagination. This has long been the stuff of Don DeLillo’s masterly fiction.

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