An editor snuck Covid-19 into Don DeLillo’s new novel—but DeLillo took it out at the last moment.
Over the weekend, in The New York Times Magazine, David Marchese spoke with Don DeLillo, the notoriously interview-shy Nobel bridesmaid whose latest novel, The Silence, will be published next week. Rather than beginning with broad strokes, Marchese’s first question reveals a late-stage reversal of one of the details of the novel, in which all the screens go blank in the middle of Super Bowl Sunday 2022. Here’s the exchange*:
Let me ask about something that’s not in The Silence, at least not anymore. In the first galley copy I read, there’s a scene in which a character is reciting disastrous events and mentions Covid-19. Then I was told there were changes to the book and was sent a second galley. Covid-19 was gone. Why did you take it out? I didn’t put Covid-19 in there. Somebody else had. Somebody else could have decided that it made it more contemporary. But I said, “There’s no reason for that.”
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. It wasn’t going to stay, that’s for sure.
To be honest, I had the same reaction as Marchese—who is going around dropping things into DeLillo novels in 2020? (Another question: does Don DeLillo approve drafts without reading them? That rascal.) Still, you can understand why an editor might want to reify this particular connection: much of the publicity material around the novel has explicitly situated it in relation to the pandemic. (This is not exactly a criticism: how could a publicist resist?) Even its descriptive copy at Bookshop begins like this: “Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of Covid-19. The Silence is the story of a different catastrophic event. Its resonances offer a mysterious solace.” It’s clear from the interview that DeLillo has been thinking about the pandemic—but also clear that he hasn’t been writing towards it.
*For any readers not versed in the specifics of the book industry, a galley copy is a very late-stage draft, usually mostly complete if possibly not proof-read, sent to reviewers ahead of publication. Large changes from the galley copies are unusual; they would rather defeat the point.
