Don DeLillo’s White Noise is essentially a long treatise on death and environmental psychology, but he’s managed to make it hilarious.
Jack Gladney is a professor of Hitler studies somewhere in Middle America, but he can’t even speak German. His life, at least superficially, is the 20th century American ideal. He lives with his third wife and their various children in a comfortable suburban existence. While he’s studying Goebbels, his family is being indoctrinated with a different kind of propaganda—consumerism. (One of his daughters, when in a state of shock, recites car models as a sort of mantra. His son constantly spews random factoids he’s learned on television.)
Though the book starts as a satire of American family life, the Gladney’s world is shattered when an “airborne toxic event” happens after a crash on a nearby railroad track, forcing an evacuation from their home and exposing Jack to toxic chemicals—ones so mysterious and new that doctors can’t tell him what will happen. After the clean-up, the Gladneys return home, but Jack becomes more and more obsessed with his own impending death. Complicating things, his wife’s odd behavior sends him on an almost Kafkaesque search for a mysterious psychiatrist who’s pushing drugs that, ironically, are promoted as a solution for all the problems Jack is facing.
While a lot of the book deals with Jack’s psychological torment, DeLillo’s at his best when he’s observing the weirdness of modern life at its most mundane. The supermarket is full of elderly people who look lost among the dazzling hedgerows. Some people are too small to reach the upper shelves; some people block the aisles with their carts, some are clumsy and slow to react; some are forgetful, some confused; some move about muttering with the wary look of people in institutional corridors.
Passages like that don’t seem new or insightful, but they capture the emptiness Jack and his neighbors are wandering through. DeLillo infuses everything with his sardonic sense of humor but he doesn’t tell jokes, just observes people’s idiosyncracies.
I’ve read two other DeLillo books, both of which dealt with the same themes. His newest, Point Omega, is written in a sparer, bleaker style. Underworld (which I loved) was in many ways White Noise on a larger scale, with the same observations of pop culture and postmodernism stretched over several decades and several plotlines.
Though White Noise was written in 1984, it doesn’t feel dated—it’s an America of shopping and mindless television and antidepressants. The Gladneys’ world is entirely familiar. There isn’t much of a plot underneath all the disjointed episodes, but it doesn’t matter, since it’s about confusion and alienation.
There’s a lot crammed into this book, throwing the reader into the same fog that Jack lives in.
