This was bad. I hope DeLillo's embarrassed about this one, but he's probably not. The man's in his eighties, and he comes across as someone trying very hard to write the way people expect Don DeLillo to write.

There are some nice ideas in the book, but they're not very well executed, and the result is a bit of a boring slurry. But the bad ideas are what really put the nail in the coffin.

We get some "phones bad" pontificating about how digital connectedness has shaped society for the worse,  which doesn't actually do much to explore how digital connectedness has shaped society. There's a lot of references to Einstein and the theory of special relativity, although DeLillo never gives a good reason why. It seems that he simply thinks it would be appropriate for a physics student to be obsessed with Einstein (though the student's former teacher doesn't seem to know anything about relativity and the student mostly talks to himself for the apparent purpose of acting like a physics student). While he could be aiming for some kind of pop-science slant on relativity as a metaphor for human connection, DeLillo doesn't even go that far. There's some meditations on how humanity would behave in a crisis, which aren't very interesting or original (for a much better novel on the topic, try José Saramago's Blindness, which has its issues, but is actually well-written and has something to say).

But perhaps the worst, most comically embarrassing moment is a passage that I'll just type out in full between spoiler tags. I really lost all hope that the novel was redeemable when I reached it, because it is just impossible to take anything seriously after reading such absurd, pretentious bunk. If at this point you still feel like the novel is still worth your time, then I hope this dissuades you. If it doesn't, please read more books, you deserve better.

Don. That's embarrassing.