Don Delillo's White Noise (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations) (Library Binding)

by Harold Bloom (Editor), Jesse Zuba (Editor) "The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus..." (more)
Key Phrases: airborne toxic event, stadium steps, radiator cover, Iron City, New York, Old Man Treadwell (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Better than any book I can think of, White Noise captures the particular strangeness of life in a time where humankind has finally learned enough to kill itself. Naturally, it's a terribly funny book, and the prose is as beautiful as a sunset through a particulate-filled sky. Nice-guy narrator Jack Gladney teaches Hitler Studies at a small college. His wife may be taking a drug that removes fear, and one day a nearby chemical plant accidentally releases a cloud of gas that may be poisonous. Writing before Bhopal and Prozac entered the popular lexicon, DeLillo produced a work so closely tuned into its time that it tells the future. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly
Chairman of the department of Hitler studies at a Midwestern college, Jack Gladney is accidently exposed to a cloud of noxious chemicals, part of a world of the future that is doomed because of misused technology, artifical products and foods, and overpopulation. PW appreciated DeLillo's "bleak, ironic" vision, calling it "not so much a tragic view of history as a macabre one." January
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Young Adult
  
• Library Binding: 246 pages
• Publisher: Chelsea House Publications (August 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791070441
• ISBN-13: 978-0791070444
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (276 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,876,197 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

68 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best novel of the eighties?, November 26, 1999

By	"lexo-2" (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: White Noise (Contemporary American Fiction) (Paperback)

White Noise was the first DeLillo I ever tried to read, a few years ago, and I was disappointed; I thought it was thin and heartless and clever-clever. Then I got older, visited America for the first time and read it again, and suddenly it seemed true, oh so true. The book is full of dark pleasures: the family's hilariously misinformed conversations about everything under the sun; the now-classic episode of The Most Photographed Barn in America (it's not especially beautiful or old, it's just been photographed over and over again); the description of a cloud of poisonous gas as an Airborne Toxic Event; the narrator's manically argumentative son Heinrich; his daughter's mysterious utterance in her sleep of the magical words "Toyota Celica". And much, much more. The crisp beauty of DeLillo's writing can seem cold on first reading, but this is a function of the eerie ambiguity of the book's tone; it's neither satirical nor celebratory, it's just looking hard at these lives and the world around them. White Noise is, for my money, DeLillo's funniest book and his most death-haunted; that he balances the ever-present fear of death with a (for him) new compassion for his characters is maybe the most amazing thing about it. It gets better every time it's read, which is the mark of a classic.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comedic Campus Chronicle Clicks, November 23, 2002

By	Jessica Hope Whiteside (Manhattan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: White Noise (Contemporary American Fiction) (Paperback)

Technology is changing the inner experience of human beings. In White Noise, Don DeLillo shows us how this is done. Waves and radiation. Television serves as kind of new collective unconscious, creating a new inner frame of reference. Jack Gladney says at one point, "His skin was a color that I want to call flesh-toned." Stephie murmurs, "Toyota Celica," in her sleep. The TV is now a member of the family. We are moving toward a post-modern mentality.

Jack Gladney is, at best, an unlikely hero, I think. He is professor of "Hitler Studies" at a great American college; an academic who is comically humanized off of the pedestal of academia to the reader. He teaches the incarnation of death and national propaganda, and then comes home to a mundane and motley family crew of ditzy third wife, step-children, and biological children deeply rooted in the national propaganda of America. The extreme superficiality of his life is astounding. Everything is meant to *seem* significant...Hitler studies, the robes and sunglasses, the most photographed barn in America. Like so much of what we see and hear nowadays...what it's about is *sounding* like it's about something important. Everything is sense impression. Never mind what a word really means...if it *sounds* solid and strong, then that's reason enough to use it. In this way we escape from nature. We create lives that "protect" us from the things that are "out there" somewhere. "I'm not just a college professor," says Jack. "I'm the head of a department. I don't see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That's for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the country, where the fish hatcheries are."

As a metafictional Heidegerrian test, White Noise is a cross between life and narrative, death and narrative closure. Delillos narrative closure is that death may go a little way toward explaining why some are dissatisfied with his endings.
As DeLillo puts it, "All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games. We edge nearer death every time we plot." If one accepts this, or accepts that DeLillo believes this, then it's hard to imagine how his endings (death) could be "satisfying" or why they (it) should be.

In light of this, can the narrative interruptions that pepper the text ("Krylon, Rust-Oleum, Red Devil") be seen as attempts to stave off the death that the narrative compels us toward, that the end of the book will bring? And what to make of the fact that most of these narrative interruptions are drawn from TV and advertising?

I wonder about the role of children, particularly Wilder, in White Noise. Murray suggests a couple of times that the way to deal with the onslaught of TV is to view TV as a child views it. Children's consciousness, he seems to believe, has evolved to a state where they can absorb this onslaught without being troubled by it. If this is true, though, why does Wilder (remember his crying jag) seem to be the most sensitive individual in the book? And why do the other children seem less like children than like small adults?

Even our language is adulterated and attenuated to protect us from confronting horror directly. In the Gladney household each family member corrects another with a further error. An exaggerated chronicle of the ludicrousness of modern America.

54 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best novels to explore contemporary life, May 3, 2003

By	P. Nicholas Keppler "rorscach12" (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: White Noise (Contemporary American Fiction) (Paperback)

In fifty years, White Noise by Don DeLillo will perhaps explain our almost demented times better than any other novel. The story centers around Jack Gladney, the chairman and founder of [German dictator] Studies at a rural university. He lives with his fourth wife, Babette, two children and two step-children in a labyrinth of junk hauled home from the local[store]. After a toxic waste spill in his neighborhood, Jack is overwhelmed by his fear of [end of life], one problem that no commercial product can solve --- or so he thinks. Throughout the story DeLillo shows almost frightening understanding of contemporary life. Supermarkets are churches; brand names are mantras; Elvis is worthy of academic interest; truth is buried by the endless hum of the (over)information age and the family as an institution struggles to hold on amidst the onslaught of changes, each more absurd than the last. One of the most unabashed and insightful dissections of life at the end of the twentieth century, White Noise is a masterpiece.