Customer Reviews

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

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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.

I'm not sure what to think of Don DeLillo. White Noise, like Mao II, like Underworld, like End Zone, is a book bursting with ideas and observations about people, the world and modern life. And some of these observations will make you see things in a new way, or at least crystallize your thoughts so perfectly that you nod your head and say, "Yes, that's exactly what I think. Now why didn't I say it like that?" Well, because you're not Don DeLillo. So give the man credit, because that's something few people can do. At the same time White Noise shows up one of DeLillo's bigger flaws: he doesn't really create characters you care about, even a little bit. Indeed, in White Noise I'm sure he didn't want to. They're not real characters at all, only a group of signifiers and commenators who all speak with the same voice and even use the same expressions, whether they are ex-sportswriters, housewives, sulking teens, or nine-year-old girls. By page 300 this gets tiresome. Intellectual insights are more memorable when they are hung on interesting and engaging characters. So while I enjoyed White Noise and am impressed with the mind behind it, I found it ultimately unsatisfying.

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.

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.

Harold Bloom has said that the common theme of great American novels -- from Moby Dick to Gravity's Rainbow -- is apocalypse. Don DeLillo's genius is turning the American literary tradition on its head with tales of anti-apocalypse. Whether it's the Cold War that never runs hot in "Underworld", the Kennedy conspiracy that masks the true national decay in "Libra" or the "airborn toxic event" in "White Noise", DeLillo is a master of building fear, taking it away, then showing how the disaster distracted us from the things we should fear most.

"White Noise" is a book about death -- more specifically, our fear of death -- and how we have created a consumer infotainment paradise to distract us from our inevitable demise. But that description hardly does the book justice. There's more brilliance on any page of "White Noise" than I could hope to write in a lifetime.

DeLillo has a knack for finding deep meaning in common things -- like a supermarket. Characters are described as much by their postures and gestures as they are by words. Most of the important meanings of the book are left for readers to think on their own.

If you need a plot and lots of A-B-C action, please don't read White Noise. It's a book for people open to seeing the world in a different light. "White Noise" proves that there is nothing more reassuring than a disaster, and nothing more terrifying than the banal.

White Noise is probably one of the best books I have ever read. It does not serve as entertainment; you don't pick this up for a read on the train. Instead, it serves as a slap in the face, disposing traditional conventions and giving way to his admirably ironic and philosophical view of modern day consumerism and death. It is vitamins for the brain.

This satire about modern day society poses thought provoking questions. Our obsession with pop-culture is peerlessly examined and the results are enlightening. And why are we afraid of death? Delillo shows us the way to our graves and gives us a chance to attempt to understand demise and doom. White Noise is so sad, so full of eloquence and so deep. I read this book nearly a year ago and to this date it remains fresh in my mind. It is so well written and artful. There are so many piercingly shocking observations into modern day America. The idiosyncracies are so lovable yet disturbing and they ring true. The narrative is fresh and powerful, overwhelming and explosive; the main character and his family so eerily familiar, the dialogue so evocative and perplexing. Every chapter shines in its brilliance, every sentence has words carefully chosen for maximum psychological impact.

The plot itself borders the line of being ridiculous and shallow, so people who want their thrillers and mysteries, you might wish to look elsewhere. But those of you who want something more challenging and rewarding, look no further. White Noise is a mind blowing trip to the finish. You will never look at life the same way again.

Simply put, to understand American literature--to understand America itself--of the last quarter-century or so, one needs to read Don Delillo. So much of what you find scattered in various contemporary authors is all here in *White Noise.* And its not just authors who've read Delillo. I'm an author who never read Delillo before last week and I find a lot of my attitude, my form of expression, even my preoccupations prefigured in the work of this man. I've imbibed him, apparently, from reading the work of other writers he's directly influenced. This is the true mark of a seminal figure--he influences indirectly, by association, he infects everything, he is the expression of the zeitgeist.

*White Noise* is a magnificent book and I don't say that lightly. To make any comparison at all, you'd have to cross Martin Amis with Michel Houllebecq and flavor the mix with the John Steinbeck of "The Winter of Our Discontent." It manages to be, by turns, cynical, comic, lyrical, winsome, tragic, and elegiac--it's neither hopeless, nor hopeful. It records the obsessions of our times perhaps as well as any novel I can recall, with the possible exception of Houellebecq's *The Elementary Particles.* Perhaps, most unusual for an American novel, *White Noise* is a true novel of Ideas, something you usually have to rely on the French to provide. Delillo does a version of intuitive cultural analysis that is at times as fascinating as anything of the sort that Ive come across outside of Elias Canetti's *Crowds and Power.* He tosses off provocative insights, theories, novel interpretations for ordinary things like he was throwing down rock salt on an icy driveway. Do the characters talk in "unrealistic" ways--you bet they do...which is to say, they talk about important issues, they talk from their hearts and souls, they talk the way we often talk to ourselves and the way we wish we could talk to others and others talk to us--as if every moment were one less moment we had to live and love and figure out the mystery of existence, which, of course, it is.

And that is the crux of *White Noise.* Death--and, specifically, the fear of it. What the fear of death does to us when we can't push it away, when it assumes a prominent place in our life, when it takes over our life, as it will, when we allow it a place in our consciousness. When we don't push it away with denial, repression, and preoccupation with the million and one brand name distractions of contemporary life. In some sense, *White Noise* is a kind of "horror novel," if we mean by "horror novel" a text in which death in its "supernatural" aspect is the major antagonist the characters must overcome. The central episode of *White Noise* is "an airborne toxic event" that hovers ominously over the town of Blacksmith and forces the evacuation of its inhabitants. The harrowing exodus of Jack Gladney and his family is as scary as anything you'd find in a novel by Stephen King...scarier, inasmuch as Delillo imparts a chilling realism to this doomsday situation that not even King can match. But it is ultimately the existential horror that Jack Gladney faces ((and that we all face)) that is the most terrifying dilemma of all and that will haunt and disturb readers of this extraordinary novel long after the final page.

For all its beauty and textual richness, for all its status as a "serious" piece of literature, *White Noise* is a remarkably smooth and easy read, fast-paced, exciting, and yes, even fun. I don't think I ever read a novel that was so intelligent so quickly and with so much sheer pleasure. Don't be deterred by its reputation. *White Noise,* inasmuch as the term `postmodern' means anything, is a very accessible book that trafficks as much in the pulp and lowbrow elements of our popular culture as it does in theory and intellectual speculation. Absolutely superb--if you haven't yet read it, this will be the best book you've read this year.

"White Noise" is both a funny and frightening examination of our fear of death. The writing is brilliant, and every word in this novel seems exquisitely chosen. The language pushes hilariously over-the-top: fourteen year old boys speak about chemistry and philosophy in a way that challenges the reader; patterns of speech that are archaically sculpted pop up repeatedly in the words of various characters, forcing us to recognize their connection.

There is a strange disease that causes people to confuse words with actual objects. This seems laughable, but the whole novel is a confusion of words and objects: the most-photographed barn, which is a landmark purely because it is the most-photographed; the daughters who psychosomatically catch symptoms that don't even exist. What is a novel if not where words and objects merge?

One man searches throughout to find escape from his fears of death. His worldly accomplishments are only false relief, a contradictory attempt both to hide and to be noticed. The pages are lined with increasingly beautiful sunsets that only serve to draw him closer. Has the boy/athlete who plans to sit with venomous snakes for months found the answer somehow? I waited anxiously for the protagonist to find his solace... Perhaps somewhere in this novel is the true answer to all our fears of death.

While this novel may not teach you how to overcome your fears, it should be read by anyone who wants to understand them better. It is clever and funny in a way that will make you stop and reconsider every joke for its deeper meaning - we are laughing constantly at ourselves. It turns families and aging and dying and itself inside out. And it seems the only true peace comes in the temporary beauty of sleeping children.

Forget trying to figure out what this book is "about". Forget the silly attempts to outline the plot or analyze the characters. In fact, drop all that stuff you learned in 8th-grade book-report class -- Delillo is the kind of writer that makes all these literary concepts passé. Read this book for what it is - a hilarious, inventive work of fiction written by a master of observation and analysis.

DeLillo's genius is in creating a world that is wholly familiar but at the same time completely alien. That's what make his riffs so compelling: it's all stuff we've seen before, but he show it to us differently - clearer, vaguer, more skewed and more accurate. Who hasn't witnessed one of those surreal diningroom table exercises where family members offer up factoids and data points, all of which are half-true products of misremembered newspaper articles and PBS specials. DeLillo's take: "The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation."
Then there's the modern state of staying busy with shopping, pop-culture, tabloid promises of relief, absurd attempts at fame (is snake-sitter Orest Mercator the prototype for "Jackass" or what?). Running throughout is a dark undercurrent: the feeling that we are living under a vague, deadly and omnipresent threat that we can't quite identify -- all we know is that it involves some combination of government agencies, toxic chemicals and the media.

Read this book once, twice, three times. You'll laugh out loud, throw the book across the room, shake your head in disbelief and wonder -- but you'll never forget you're reading the work of a true literary genius.

If you're into postmodernist writing, this book is for you. As for me, I find highly ironic books like this one make me anxious: they're so ironic that you never know whether you're getting the point, or whether the book is making fun of you for getting the point, or whether there really is no point and that's the point. But then, if the point of the book is to abandon all meaning, then ... and my head starts to hurt, and I wonder whether I'm just the sort of [person] that the author is making fun of.

_White Noise_ makes fun of the state of technological- and media-saturation that we've landed in. There's a possible chemical spill in a nearby town, and all the people nearby decide whether they're sick based on whether the local news broadcast tells them they should be. The narrator is the founder and head of the Department Of Hitler Studies at his college. Just from this, you can discern the kind of book that it will be.

The book focuses on the alienation and frustration and low-level confusion that everyone feels but no one can put his or her hands on. It ``documents the postmodern condition", a phrase that I write while fearing that I'm a wanker for writing it. But being that kind of documentarian is clearly DeLillo's goal.

The problem is that a lot of postmodern writing - this book included - immunizes itself against criticism. _A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius_ by Dave Eggers is the height of this phenomenon, to me anyway. Eggers makes fun of those who would try to hunt for meaning in artistic works, and clearly lays out all that's wrong with his book at the very beginning. Those who would criticize Eggers can do no more than he's already done. Does Eggers really believe that his book is heartbreaking, or a genius-level work? It's hard to tell, because his postmodernness disguises all statements under a sheet of irony. Ditto for _White Noise_: am I even allowed to criticize it, or is criticism and meaning-discovery a woefully modernist thing to do?

David Foster Wallace makes the point in an essay from _A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again_ that irony is not a constructive thing. In high doses, irony is alienating, tiring, and ultimately deeply saddening. Irony doesn't tell us how to solve problems - it's just a way of pointing out what's wrong. So when we get a book like _White Noise_ that is essentially 200 pages of pure irony, we leave it feeling confused and slightly afraid - but not because we're afraid of the things that the author is being ironic about. After a while, irony makes it hard to see anything in a clean light.

So I give _White Noise_ a thumbs-up with some reservations. Perhaps I've just not read enough postmodern works to find them beautiful yet. Or is finding them beautiful even the point?