70 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
BRIEFLY NOTED
The Silence, by Don DeLillo (Scribner). Classic DeLillo
themes—digital technology, graphology, geopolitics—abound
in this slim novel, in which friends gather amid a mysterious
cataclysm. On a Sunday in 2022, screens go blank and cir-
cuits fail, interrupting a couple’s Super Bowl party and caus-
ing a plane to malfunction. As the aircraft goes down, a man
on it imagines “all those thousands of passengers before us
who have experienced this and then were silenced forever.”
DeLillo subordinates the characters’ individuality to a wide-
angle view of the blackout, and creates a powerful rendering
of a crowd unified by a terrifying event that defies all avail-
able models of comprehension.
A Lover’s Discourse, by Xiaolu Guo (Grove). Like the Ro-
land Barthes treatise from which it takes its title, this novel
unfolds as a series of vignettes. Guo’s narrator, a recent im-
migrant to London from China, addresses each episode to
her Australian lover. After the Brexit referendum, the cou-
ple attempt to reconcile their differences in class, race, and
family history through high-minded discussions about art,
originality, and language. (“Perhaps I should learn a man’s
character by paying attention to the way he uses verbs,” the
woman says, after a particularly frustrating miscommunica-
tion.) Their ideological disagreements give way to more prac-
tical considerations of belonging as they move from England
to Australia to Germany, wondering, at each uprooting, if the
new locale will assuage their alienation.
A World Beneath the Sands, by Toby Wilkinson (Norton). In
1798, when Napoleon embarked upon his Egyptian campaign,
he brought along some hundred “savants,” tasked with unlock-
ing the secrets of ancient Egypt. The era of Egyptology, vividly
detailed in this history, had arrived, with successive European
powers using “ownership” of Egypt’s archeological riches to
assert cultural supremacy. Wilkinson focusses squarely on West-
ern personalities (Egyptian perspectives are largely absent), yet
this is not a glorifying account. For every scholarly triumph
(the deciphering of the Rosetta stone, say), there is an outrage:
artifacts smuggled, workers abused, sex slaves bought. Above
all, Wilkinson amply conveys the pettiness, racism, and con-
descension that underpinned the looting of a civilization.
Grieving, by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from the Span-
ish by Sarah Booker (Feminist Press). In this collection of es-
says, journalism, and criticism, a noted novelist turns an eru-
dite eye on the damage wrought in Mexico by drug wars,
migration, violence against women, and neoliberalism’s ero-
sion of communitarian life. Mining experiences from a life-
time lived in both the United States and Mexico, Rivera Garza
returns repeatedly to the vulnerability of the human body and
to writing’s potential as a tool of resistance. For all the losses
tallied, the pieces are imbued with optimism and an activist’s
passion for reshaping the world. In an essay from 2016, just
after Donald Trump’s electoral victory, she writes that “per-
haps time is just beginning and our lives have just begun.”
and principled moth were able to talk,”
the art critic John Russell once said
about Hazzard, “that is what she would
sound like.” A young friend lovingly
characterized her as “preposterous,
though not absurd,” and recalled her
speaking “in full, long paragraphs with-
out line breaks.”
With far-flung origins, an itinerant
coming of age, and a husband a quar-
ter century her senior, Hazzard lived
a life remote from those of her con-
temporaries. She disliked television
and, later, literary theory and personal
computers. Her fiction, which is about
straight, white, well-read expatriates
who speak to one another in mannered,
idea-dense dialogue, was old-fashioned
even at the time (“Victorian,” per the
book reviews). Yet, if the turbulence
of privileged spheres feels familiar, the
intensity and precision of her focus
does not.
“Scruple was a tiny measure, used
perhaps by a jeweler or a chemist,”
Aldred Leith muses in “The Great Fire”
(2003), Hazzard’s final and most auto-
biographical novel. Leith, a wounded
British soldier travelling through post-
war Asia, has fallen in love with the
much younger Helen Driscoll, an Aus-
tralian teen-ager living in occupied Ja-
pan: “He had never dealt, in love or
otherwise, in such minute quantities.”
These are the quantities—subjective,
invisible to the naked eye—with which
Hazzard most often deals. The intel-
lectual thrill of her work arises from
her ability to describe the small, con-
stituent particles of emotional matter
we typically consider irreducible. A
character in her 1964 story “Comfort”
notes that “not kind” was a more damn-
ing characterization of a person than
“cruel,” as it “implied having under-
stood the principle of kindness and
having rejected it.” Confidence, another
observes in “The Party,” published two
years earlier, is “one of those things we
try to instill into others and then has-
ten to dispel as soon as it puts in an
appearance.” Then, the corrosive re-
joinder: “Like love.”
W
riting about “The Transit of
Venus” in the third person feels
a bit like telling a lie by omission. I first
read the book two years ago and have
reread it five times since, finishing it
