Live Breaking News & Updates on Contemporary British Novel

Part way through
The Silence by Don DeLillo (Picador) I came across a passage that resonated with me more that it perhaps might have done in other circumstances. One of the characters, in one of those archetypal DeLillo conversations that have the dispiriting and disconnecting feel of overlapping monologues, asks: “Is this the casual embrace that marks the fall of world civilization?”
DeLillo’s novella was written before the pandemic that has had us all spending the year in that casual embrace, but for me it captures perfectly the affect of that year: the sense of isolation, the way that everything is turned so resolutely inwards that any world out there disappears from our ken. And in a year in which our social life has been conducted digitally, our cultural life has been spent not in cinemas and theatres, in concert halls and galleries, but in front of a television screen, then the loss of that digital connection, the blankness of that television screen, is especi ....

United Kingdom , Paul Kincaid , Jonathan Lethem , Joanne Turnbull , Caroline Edwards Cambridge , M John Harrison Gollancz , Adam Roberts Palgrave , Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky , Charles Kingsley , Siri Hustvedt , Don Delillo , Waubgeshig Rice , Crusted Snow , Contemporary British Novel , Caroline Edwards , Literary Life , Adam Roberts , Inventing Tomorrow , Twentieth Century , Sarah Cole , Utopia Avenue , David Mitchell , Christopher Priest , Dream Archipelago , Soviet Union , Sunken Land Begins ,