Product Description: Jack Gladney teaches Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America where his colleagues include New York expatriates who want to immerse themselves in "American magic and dread." Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the usual rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. Then a lethal black cloud floats over their lives, an airborne "toxic event," an industrial accident. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladney family - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings - pulsing with life, yet filled with dread and danger.
"A stunning performance from one of our most intelligent novelists...also, tremendously funny." (The New Republic)
Amazon.com Review: Something is amiss in a small college town in Middle America. Something subliminal, something omnipresent, something hard to put your finger on. For example, teachers and students at the grade school are falling mysteriously ill:
Investigators said it could be the ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation, the electrical insulation, the cafeteria food, the rays emitted by microcomputers, the asbestos fireproofing, the adhesive on shipping containers, the fumes from the chlorinated pool, or perhaps something deeper, finer-grained, more closely woven into the fabric of things.
J.A.K. Gladney, world-renowned as the living center, the absolute font, of Hitler Studies in North America in the mid-1980s, describes the malaise affecting his town in a superbly ironic and detached manner. But even he fails to mask his disquiet. There is menace in the air, and ultimately it is made manifest: a poisonous cloud--an "airborne toxic event"--unleashed by an industrial accident floats over the town, requiring evacuation. In the aftermath, as the residents adjust to new and blazingly brilliant sunsets, Gladney and his family must confront their own poses, night terrors, self-deceptions, and secrets.
DeLillo is at his dark, hilarious best in this 1985 National Book Award winner, a novel that preceded but anticipated the explosion of the Internet, tabloid television, and the dialed-in, wired-up, endlessly accelerated tenor of the culture we live in. He doesn't just describe life in a hypermediated society, he re-creates it. His characters repeat phrases, information, and rumor gleaned from television, radio, and other media sources like people speaking in code. And DeLillo has seeded the book with short gemlike episodes that demand to be read aloud, and that haunt the imagination years after their first reading: a visit to the Most Photographed Barn in America. A plane that nearly falls out of the sky. An hour in a classroom, canonizing Elvis. These vignettes are vivid and unique, yet, like the phrases from television shows that interject themselves, out of context, into Gladney's consciousness, they are strangely unconnected to one another--reflections of the lives DeLillo is showing us we lead. --Jan Bultmann
Infuriatingly self-important It is rare that I have a reaction of violent dislike to a book, and even books that I do not especially like I can find something respectable or interesting about the text, but I hate this book. This is the sort of literature that gets first-year philosophy majors to cream themselves because it is oh-so-insightful and important, and allows all the armchair intellectuals of the world to feel a little bit more superior because they assume the cleverness of Delillo's writing is lost on lesser minds. This isn't a novel, it's an extended postmodern manifesto that exposes the philosophy for the empty, whiny system of nihilism that it is. This novel has no characters, only insufferable stereotypes who can't walk through a produce isle at the grocery store without disappearing up their butts with lengthy, obnoxious monologues that somehow equate buying apples with death (exemplified by the single most unbearable character I have ever come across, Murray); it doesn't have drama, only histrionics. What makes this a thoroughly unenjoyable and ultimately uninteresting is that it is a work that sags under the weight of its own importance; it is so persistently self-conscious that I can't take it seriously as a work of literature--it spends a couple hundred pages trying to convince me how great it is without actually being great. What's more, if this novel were a failure as a novel but still offered some genuine insight into the experience of the individual in a post-modern world, it would still succeed as a work of philosophy. But it doesn't; every sentence feels like a catch-phrase rather than a substantive statement. The difficult thing about criticizing a novel like this is that defenses of it are always predicated on the notion that disliking it reflects a misunderstanding of postmodernism itself--that is, those who dislike this novel obviously are not sophisticated enough to untangle the dense threads of philosophic intent that make it what it is. But, I do understand postmodernism (don't like it but still understand it) and still feel this is a failure. While reading it I was reminded of the infinitely superior Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut), and thought that this is what that great work would read like if stripped of all its originality and craft. That is a successful postmodern novel; this one is several long hours of my life I will never get back.
Hmmm.... This book was amazing. I'm only giving it 4 out of five stars because you need to be a fairly well read, a very literate person to understand and read, to truly enjoy the genius that Delillo portrays. It was wonderful. I found myself sad at parts, shocked at others, but mostly just incredibly interested at how Delillo is able to grab that part of life that we all see but don't acknowledge.
Listen to the 'White Noise' Starts off being funny in absurd and macabre ways with blended family, a Professor of Hitler studies and a would be Professor of Elvis and slowly transforms itself into a Kafkaesque nightmare. Much easier to read than his later novels and well worth the effort.
Consumptive Consumerism White Noise / 0-14-007702-2
White Noise, arguably Delillo's best work, carefully explores a world where consumerism has, almost literally, consumed us all, to the point where we become empty shells of people.
The extended family in the book have been reduced by consumerism to two-dimensional beings, dependent upon television and other cultural stimuli to tell them how to think and behave. Occasionally, they act out against this emptiness (or is it that a wire has been crossed in the brain?) with idiosyncrasies such as a pronounced preference for the smell of burnt toast, or a tendency to find frumpy jogging outfits attractive. On the weekends, they shop at the local supermarket, under the soporific thrall of the overhead neon lights.
When their consumer culture literally threatens to kill them, via a toxic waste spill on the town railroad, they are ill-prepared to respond and look to their customary authorities (television and radio) on how to react to the emergency. When fire trucks storm through town, broadcasting an evacuation notice, the mother wonders absently whether the evacuation is a suggestion or a command. And in the aftermath of the toxic cloud, even when many have died and many more have had their lives shortened by exposure to the poison, the town feels no outrage, only numbness that what is normally confined to the television news stories nevertheless happened in their idyllic town. Actors themselves, they practice emergency evacuations, determined to perform better "next time".
Despite the shallowness of their lives, they fear death. Some self-medicate with dangerous experimental drugs in an attempt to control that fear. Others take up death-defying hobbies in the hope that this will deaden their fear. They discuss which food preservatives will kill them, whether the phones lines will cause cancer, which yoga poses will prolong their lives, and how to squeeze every drop of life out of their lives. When a character points out how much energy is wasted in daily life (carrying things that don't need to be carried, making extra trips, etc.), another asks what would one do with all the saved energy. The answer: Live longer. In this way, Delillo paints a stunning and frightening portrait of a community that fears death yet has no love for life.
The Meaning of Life Turn your radio to AM and randomly switch from channel to channel. Record the snippets of call-in questions, sports reports, legal advice, and advertising slogans that follow. Read it as you would a story. It's disjointed, sure, but every once in awhile, you'll find a moment of transcendent brilliance. Like this book by Don DeLillo. He's taken nutrition labels, manufacturer specs, commercials, newscasts, popular music, history, religious polemics (I could go on) and woven his soundbytes into a story of a man and a woman who are terrified of death, a toxic cloud, speculation on the similarities between Elvis and Hitler, and ultimately, the question of meaning.
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