A brilliant satire of mass culture and the numbing effects of technology, White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, a teacher of Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America. Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. Then a … Then a lethal black chemical cloud, unleashed by an industrial accident, floats over there lives, an “airborne toxic event” that is a more urgent and visible version of the white noise engulfing the Gladneys—the radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, and TV murmurings that constitute the music of American magic and dread.
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Slow and pointless. I like the author but this is the worst of what I have read of his
DeLillo is one of the great American writers. Great book, incisive portrait of a place in time.
This book was an engaging and interesting read, focusing on the life of a professor, his wife, and their large extended family. The narrative is packed with ironic and often very humorous descriptions of the absurdities of modern life. The story focuses on the characters, their relationships, and their psychological torments. Specifically, the book tends to dwell on the characters’ feelings about death and destruction. It also contains many humorous scenes revealing various shortcomings concerning education and disinformation. Although the book begins with a lighthearted tone, it becomes darker and darker as the story progresses. Overall, the vivid descriptions and exaggerated situations make this book very fun to read.
If you’ve ever seen the band The Airborne Toxic Event in concert, you can thank Don Delillo because the phrase comes from his 1985 novel White Noise. It refers to a chemical cloud produced by a spill that terrorizes a community where his characters live. The best of Delillo’s writing is eery and unsettling and has a strange feeling that it is happening while we are reading it. Delillo’s specialty is hysteria and groupthink. He is especially interested in crowds and the sort of herd behavior that accompanies large poorly-defined threats to whole communities. In Delillo’s books, the more people there are involved in an event, and gathered in one place, the scarier it is and the greater the potential for mysterious tragedies and unexplained behavior. This is also true of his 1991 novel Mao II, which looks at cults like the Moonies and tells the strange story of a girl’s efforts to deprogram after escaping a cult. Even his 1988 novel Libra which is technically about a single person, Lee Harvey Oswald, is indirectly about the crowds present at JFK’s assassination and the peculiar, homicidally-reactive behavior of fringe figures like Oswald and his killer, Jack Ruby. Delillo is one of the more gifted writers on the subject of hysteria and how it began to infect American culture in the 60s, and how it is now always with us, under the surface, waiting for the right conditions to break out in the form of a cult, or a riot, or a lone gunman who has contained his hysteria for as long as he can. Of the three books, Libra is probably the masterpiece because it takes up Oswald’s point of view and treats him as the hero of a story he has somewhat made up in his head as a way to impose a shape on the need he has — on a need we all have to some degree — to see himself as a capable person with an important, risky, even heroic goal he is trying to achieve. The hysteria comes from the fact that, every time he tries to become the winner he feels he’s meant to be, he runs face-first into a reality that limits, blocks and frustrates his attempts to be anything but the consummate definition of a loser.
I know others love this, but I struggled from the early pages. It just wasn’t a settings or milieu that interests me. The writing felt repetitive to me. Were all the lists meant to be funny? The references don’t resonate for me, so I’m clearly not the intended audience, and wasn’t pulled in enough to want to educate myself. Not offensive or anything; just really not my cup of tea.
This book is a hoot! Loved it!
Yesterday, I told you guys about how I read American Psyhco by Bret Easton Ellis for a class I took in my final year at University. I read Don DeLillo’s White Noise for this class as well, and it was a pretty enjoyable read, I must admit. It took me a while to read it, yes, but it’s in no way the book’s fault.
(My grandmother had just passed away when I borrowed this book from the library, so it took me a while to get through it after that.)
Before we delve into this book’s plot though, I’d like to look at the definition of the title.
As you guys know, ‘white noise’ is that weird static-y sound you get on televisions or radios that haven’t tuned into a channel or station. It’s a very annoying sound, but leave it in the background long enough and you barely hear it anymore.
Coincidentally, that’s also one of the definitions of ‘white noise’ – noise that you don’t pay attention to anymore after a while; like the sound of construction outside your house for a year straight, or the sound of the train zooming past if you work in a train station. Noise that has no affect on your thought processes or every day life.
Another meaning for white noise is one coming from the world of economy: white noise is an event that is supposed to have a profound effect on the world, but barely leave a mark. This last one is the definition this book deals with.
Jack Gladney is going through his fifth marriage, raising a brood of very mismatched children. His biological son, Heinrich, is an example of Jack’s fascination with Hitler. In fact, Jack teaches Hitler studies at the local university in their suburban, Midwestern town. Jack and his wife, Babette, are deathly afraid of…well, death. But they’re also terribly fascinated by it, finding new things to worry about that could potentially kill them. It’s actually quite strange how excited they get about an event that could kill them.
Somewhere along the book’s plot – it’s winding, beautifully written plot – a chemical spill happens in their town, causing everybody to be evacuated from their home and taken to the community centre to wait until the disaster is averted completely. Jack was outside the house when the spill happened, meaning that he has inhaled just a bit of the toxic gas that was in the air at the time. As a man in his 40s, Jack is quite young still, and is worried that he might die in a few days. The scientists in the town, however, tell him that the toxic chemical takes a very long time to actually affect his body – twenty to thirty years, in fact. By the time the chemical starts to take a significant toll on his body, Jack will be ready to die naturally anyway.
But does Jack listen?
Nooooooooooooo.
Jack worries himself to death (heh.) and literally becomes all-consumed by his fear of a chemical in his body which is killing him so slowly he can barely notice it happening. Jack literally becomes engrossed in an event that can, effectively, be described as white noise.
I can almost hear you guys just making sounds of realization.
I won’t reveal anymore of what the book deals with, coz there is a lot more that I haven’t mentioned here. But I will say this – it’s a book that makes you really think about your mortality, and about what’s really important in life. The life that Jack and his family lead is a very superficial, material one (not as material as Patrick Bateman’s life, though), and reading this book really does put certain things into perspective.
Final rating: 4/5.
I’ve taught this book for many years and it’s always a pleasure. So much humor, insight, warmth, confusion and fear rolled into a set of great scenes with punchy, memorable lines
A fine satirical novel examining the crazy 1980’s in Middle America – malls, tabloids, cults, UFOs and mysterious toxins. A fun read, I liked it.
This book was so different, it makes me want to read more of his books and to re-read some from the past. The plot and the characters had much more depth than many contemporary books. I loved it.
Mr. DeLillo starts out with a promising premise, but eventually gets lost in his own idea. He can’t quite decide what story he wants to tell, and as he illustrates his characters being surrounded by the white noise that infects contemporary life, his own “signal to noise” ratio drops unbearably low.
His main characters are, quite frankly, boring, and aroused little sympathy. The narrative flow is frequently disrupted by vignettes that have nothing to do with the plot (such as it is), and could easily have been omitted or peeled off into a short story. Perhaps I just don’t get it, and that’s all part of the “white noise” premise.
There are certainly clever bits, and the author’s command of language is impressive. Never the less, one gets the feeling at the end of the book that Mr. DeLillo had become as indifferent to the fate of his characters as his readers by that time, and simply decided that he’d written enough. The various plot lines aren’t resolved, and I was insufficiently engaged as a reader to care.
Talk about overwritten! Characters with little education spout pages and pages of philosophical ruminations. At first, I pondered the “insights.” But after awhile, I realized that these impressive sounding sentence fragments were just clever phrasing of the sophomoric discussions I had in my youth. One good thing: If you do get caught up in the plot and want to know what happens next, you can skip so many pages that the book becomes a quick read.
Absolutely schizophrenic Would not recommend