White Noise by Don DeLillo

I actually finished White Noise by Don DeLillo last Thursday, May 29th while I was on vacation in Memphis, Tennessee. So this post is a little late.

Published in 1985, White Noise is an indictment of how media saturation, information overload, quackery, fear of death, fractured families, and most of all, consumerism rule the day in late-20th Century America. I can only wonder if DeLillo imagined that it would get worse with the Internet, satellite radio, and the vast expansion of cable and satellite television. It's rather amazing that we can function at all in the modern environment.

Nominally, the novel is about Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler studies at a university. Yep, Hitler studies. Gladney invented it. The book follows Gladney, his third (fourth?) wife Babette, their children together and from previous marriages. Largely, the book demonstrates how we are overwhelmed by the information saturation of daily life and that we are only jarred out of it through true crisis. It takes a significant, perhaps catastrophic event to cut through the incessant white noise. In this instance it was a "toxic airborne event." (actually other events too, but they were more personal to the characters.) A chemical spill caused the toxic airborne event. This served to show that people really only care about the horrors of TV whenever they're actually involved in them. But in the great post-modernist tradition, the people seemed to hate it when their tragic event wasn't given enough air time. One of the high points of the writing for me was DeLillo's interjection of fragments of dialogue from the TV into the text. These interjections were apropos of nothing. Often they were product names. All of which made it seem almost too real. I couldn't count the number of times I've been talking to someone in the room or on the phone and you get distracted by something said or viewed on the television (or someone else in the room involved in another conversation).

From there the book truly damns the "better living through chemistry" pharmacological society. A pill is created that may or may not eliminate the fear of death. DeLillo poses the question from there as to whether life is worth living without the fear of death. Do things still have value when you don't know that you're going to lose them someday with Death?

Of all the books I've written about so far, I'm really not giving this one the best treatment. It's very difficult to summarize the book without giving anything important away. So I figure it's better to leave it brief and incomplete rather than to possibly spoil anything.

In relation to all the other books so far, this novel made me think harder than any of the others. It really speaks to some of the fundamental questions of living in today's society. I imagine that I should read the book again in a year or two to see if anything new pops out at me. As it was, I found this to be a magnificent book that definitely should be part of the canon of great literature. I'm very surprised that I haven't heard more about this book. While I still think All the King's Men is probably still the top of the heap for me, White Noise is a close second.