American Silence is an original history book. From the historian's point of view the period covered in the book starts with the Lewis and Clark expedition and ends with glimpses of the decade following World War II. From the creative writer's point of view, the book tells a different hestory, the one where the canvas of Bingham's Fur Traders Descending the Missouri extends into Dorothea Lange's The Road West – U.S. 54 in New Mexico. American Silence fills up the “unpainted … absence” (13) of the masculine landscape with the “no there there” (114) of the feminine inner wilderness at a point where “everything [becomes] conjuncture” (2) and collapses into silence.

Papanikolas uses his pen like a camera. This is not a book in any common sense of the term, but a carefully scripted docudrama: the elements of mise-en-scène, the process of editing and camera work, the cast, the voice-over and even the sound track are all there. As it stands, the book is ready to become a film.

The book's transitional shots and frequent fast-paced and unexpected cross-cuttings result in a series of encounters staged throughout the book between various key figures in American history alongside their silent ghosts in a scenario reminiscent of Sixth Sense. In its various wide-angle shots, the book foregrounds overlooked details from the lives of its “distinguished” Americans against the middle- and backgrounds of the grand narratives of the nation's major historical events.

Beyond the visible landscapes and material images, this docudrama works on yet another abstract level, offering insights onto the navel of the American dream. It begins with the “imaginary landscape of [Jefferson's] mind” (6) and ends with Hank Williams's “I saw the Light” via Pollock's untranslatable (150) paintings. In this sense, American Silence might as well be subtitled “The Significance of the Inner Frontier in American History: Turner's Thesis Turned Inside Out.” “In that timeless world of suppressed history” (15) and renewed moments of conquest, “the landscape itself kept falling away from a nation” (144) because the pastoral ideal of the nation's father, like any pastoral, “has in it the seeds of its own destruction” (15).

As the multilayered meaning associated with the idea of “silence” unfolds throughout the book, it reveals an unexpected perspective on the psychological origins of American imperialism. The painful silence of “loss” projected in a historical vacuum is also the silence of “absence” and “solitude.” “Perhaps that solitude is what creates the need for conquest” (20). With renewed moments of conquest presented as compulsory for what O'Sullivan described in the middle of the nineteenth century as the “Great Nation of Futurity,” silence reveals yet another disturbing meaning. It is the silence of “failure” “that inevitably accompanies that dream of conquest” (20). At its deeper psychological levels, Papanikolas explains how this silence is nothing other than a trope for an incomplete or lost sexual perfection (20).

The chain of texts introduced in the book is structured like a Lacanian metonymy whose links are made of female signifiers. Thus the absent other or a Sacagawea in Bingham's painting becomes Clarence King's secret black wife and other “archaic women” (46), to re-emerge in the guise of a missing chapter from Henry Adams's autobiographical Education. The metonymic chain extends in the beginning of the nineteenth century in E. J. Bellocq's photographs of the nameless and sometimes faceless prostitutes of New Orleans or in the shape of Chopin's Edna Pontellier.

Papanikolas's narrator delves deeper into the multiplying thresholds of American silence till he stumbles against the figure of Gertrude Stein, who is cast in the role of the femme fatale in this docudrama. But “who, just who, might she be?” (101). The metonymic chain is arrested.

When the endeavour of Papanikolas's omniscient narrator to make sense of the enigma of Stein fails and he finds himself expressing his thoughts in the style of her “infectious prose,” a smash-cut takes us back to hestory, or is it his(s)tory, that of Hemingway? After all, Stein is always “bored” and probably boring, too. Papanikolas's narrator enters the silence of Hemingway, escaping that of Stein, only to find himself in another silence; this time it is the silence of Raymond Chandler. The introduction of the detective story brings to mind the enigma of Stein in “that zero place of who we are” (126). Like Chandler's detectives, Stein “wrote to see, and to be seen, not to be revealed” (110). The enigma of the femme fatale of American Silence keeps spinning like the White City's Ferris Wheel. But “who, just who, might she be?”

Papanikolas explains in the beginning of his book that “these voices were all American voices” (19), and their silence is also “a voice coming out of my own childhood” (18), because “in almost any kind of writing you are, in effect, finding yourself” (19). There is a tragic dimension in that process of self-discovery, the act of naming the silence of one's inner wilderness and the “she” of its stories and narratives.

The narrator of American Silence expresses, through this process of identification with his protagonists, the artist's frustration about painting “the insufficiency of art” (141), the historian's confusion about “the duty of historians” (77), and the educator's reluctance to wake up in the morning “to support a house of snotty whores” (90). And beyond these three figures, the book interrogates every twenty-first-century person about their relation to and responsibility towards their time at key moments of historical transition lest they realize, like Henry Adams, that they had been educated for a previous century (69) or live their lives like “men pointed towards the future” (71) when in fact they were unsuitable for their present and unable to make sense of their past. Such men always “die insolvent” (51).

But “who, just who, might she be?”

This is where we touch upon the idea of America as an ineffable metaphor. America is here an “idea” that does not speak because it is infinite points of entry whose inner landscapes are always silent. Standing at the gates of this (American) silence, the artist, historian and educator are faced with two options: either fall on conquest (which Papanikolas associates with a masculine impulse), or open themselves to an inner “unmarked and penetrable” (153) landscape (which is depicted in the book as a feminine attribute), where one stumbles against the limits of the intelligible and “looks over the brink of the self” (154) and of history.

“‘I am a landscape,’ he said, ‘a landscape and a person walking in that landscape’,” writes Denise Levertov in the opening lines of her poem “Zeroing In.” “The rest is silence.”