Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful
Review: This is one of my two all-time favorite books (the other being 'Stones from the River'). For me this was a book about people. It was about what it means to be a 'yes' person in this life. Each thread in White Noise made me think about what happens when we choose to be sheep. That we often don't even try to see 'the most photographed barn' in America as A BARN, but only as "THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA." That choosing to love Elvis or Hitler can be (on some level) the same. That sometimes choosing to see something as everyone else sees it isn't even a choice -- it's a thoughtless habit. That maybe, just maybe, we ought to try to choose differently.I first read this book nearly ten years ago. I could read it again every few months and find something new to think about and to make me laugh. This is a wonderful book. I'd recommend it to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: The prose of impending death
Review: DeLillo manages to capture the subtlties of modern suburbia with amazingly accurate prose and an experienced eye. Jack Gladney's world is intellectually formless on which he attempts to impose some kind of meaning, no matter the resistance he encounters (the paralyzing wit of his own children, his wife's fear of death that seems to exceed his own, his obsession with the master of death himself, Hitler, and his inability to replicate the harsh gutturalness of the German language). DeLillo's book is a work of brilliance. It left me breathless and hyper-aware of my own surroundings. It left me afraid, amused, astonished, and branded with his own signature mark.
Rating: 
Summary: suburbia just isn't this strange
Review: DeLillo is supposed to be one of our best contemporary novelists. Alas, when I picked up this book, I found a world of Hitler obsessions, death worries, multiple divorces, sexual blackmail, and toxic waste disasters. Perhaps there is some satyrical level that I didn't get, but I couldn't identify with any of this. THe characters are two dimensional and the story is too outlandish to be taken seriously. Is it my imagination, or are contemporary novels supposed to be bizarre? Sure, American suburbs are like an odd bubble in history, but no one I know is this crazy. This is mediocre.
Rating: 
Summary: As dull as white noise
Review: The central character, Jack Gladney, is an academic and an authority on Hitler who has trouble speaking German. He and his wife, Babette, have several children, residue of their past marriages to others. All of the children, however young, talk the same as all of the adults, however old. There is, in other words, no individuality in the dialogue. A toxic cloud enveloped part of the imaginary village where Jack and Babette live, but I didn't care, because there are no engaging characters in the book....END
Rating:
Summary: Hitler Studies and Avoiding Death Through White Noise
Review: This book grabbed me from the moment the professor protagonist reveals that his subject at this midwestern college is Hitler Studies. He also relates what his colleagues in allied popular culture studies in other colleges are exploiting academically. Need I mention that one of them does Elvis to our hero's Hitler? I must have laughed a good ten minutes when I first read about this academic pursuit. This novel is darkly comic and if you don't laugh while reading it, you're missing it. However, underneath everything that is going on, and the protagonist realizes this, is that his life has become endless white noise (mindless distractions) to take his mind off of his own ultimate death. He puts us squarely in that boat with him so that we see the white noise in our own lives. He takes white noise in as if it is the air he is breathing wherever he is. When he is at the supermarket, for example, he is scanning the tabloid headlines while waiting in the checkout line as his white noise. I'd never heard of the author prior to this novel but all of America has heard of his books since then as "White Noise" launched him to the forefront of fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Well written trash
Review: I enjoyed listening to Delillo's sentences. His skill with structure is almost poetic in that these sentences have flow and rhythm that a poet would love. Having said that, I really didn't like this book. It starts out confused, and ends up confused. Delillo could have written this in a single chapter, and he wouldn't have lost anything. The fear of death, hiding from reality in the white noise, even the sexual connotations of our world, all could have been put into one short story, and it would have been interesting, besides. The sentences have balance, flow, and beauty. The novel does not.
Rating:
Summary: God did I try
Review: For years I heard what a wonderful book this is. Finally I bought it to read. And read, and read, and read, even though my wife, a brilliant engineer said she hated it when she read it ten years ago and that I was wasting my time. It took me a month to finish, and every night it put me to sleep after about three pages. The Hitler studies concept was brilliant (except Mel Brooks had already done it) and there were indeed some amusing parts, but pretentious does not begin to describe this book. Thank God for... readers because I thought surely something is wrong with me if I'm the only person in the world except for my wife who doesn't like this book. Then I found out I wasn't alone--there are a lot of us on the sidewalk who see that this emperor isn't wearing any clothes. Not only that, he's butt ugly besides. I absoulely recommend this book. You will, like many, either love it and join the cult, or like many of the rest of us, be utterly amused that so little can be taken for so much by so many. One way or another, you are going to feel good about yourself, and so much smarter. In my case, I decided I am much too smart for this book. Definitely decide for yourself; it's a litmus test of intelligence, and you can't fail.
Rating:
Summary: Ethnographers will swoon
Review: I imagine ethnographers 500 year down the line (as long as we don't kill ourselves first) reading Delillo and finding themselves appalled at the disconnectedness and chaos that his characters find so strangely comforting. White Noise is filled with just that, a mosaic of infinite and random complexity that is somehow alluring and mesmerizing even while we realize in the end that there is not substance there. Imagine staring at the snow of a television screen without a cable or antennae hookup. After a while your mind would start projecting images onto that vibrating light. Now think of American society as that TV and Delillo as the one staring at it, seeing a pattern, in fact projecting a pattern onto it; imagining a reality that is just as plausible as any other. Delillo is a writer of incredible perception. I read somewhere that (and I paraphrase) that great books teach you how to read them. Delillo is a writer who can create such books. This imposition of perspective and perception though is not to be trusted, for as Delillo points out, America is a land of misinformation. There is a kitchen table scene in White Noise where the family is sharing their trivial bit of data with the family. It becomes apparent that none of this information has any basis in fact, if such a concept as "factual" can even exist. With this knowledge then it is important to recognize that Delillo is just one more misinformant of the masses. Ok, so he isn't on the same level as most people, but it seems that we should think twice before reading his White Noise perceptions and looking for corollaries in our society. As a writer in college I remember people reading my work and saying things like, "Yeah, I totally see that...that's exactly the way I think about it." I realized that what these readers were doing was trying to identify with my characters. This was not my intention, as I had been reading Delillo at the time and was trying to create characters that I couldn't possibly imagine as real. I see people doing this same thing with White Noise...trying to identify with it and to some extent you can, but there is a bold element of absurdity running through this novel that precludes any true connection one can make with it. Under the absurdity is a vein of truth. This seems to be enough to keep us reading because it makes us laugh at our own consumerist, thoughtless, information-saturated, knowledgeless culture. It also should make us shudder at the idea that we could become this chaotic world of disconnection. Great books teach you how to read them, but they also teach you how to read your world and your self. White Noise is such a book.
Rating: 
Summary: A taste of impact
Review: Since this is the first thing by DeLillo I read, I was unprepared for his style, which can be off-putting to first time readers, but with a little effort, it builds its own rhythms. Through the almost madcap story of Jack Gladney, a Nazi professor, and his patchwork family of kids from previous marriages, DeLillo presents a concise evaluation of mass consumerism and the fear of death. I agree with one of the previous reviewers that the characters seem almost two-dimensional, but it serves a purpose. It was during the episode of the airborne toxic event that I connected to DeLillo's use of modern absurdity to make us look at ourselves and our culture in a new fashion.
Rating:
Summary: the triumph of death
Review: the prologue to delillo's *underworld* is called "the triumph of death," and i can scarcely imagine a better description of *white noise*. *white noise* is a masterful meditation on the state of death, ca. 1985, when mankind has discovered numerous new ways to destroy himself but hasn't quite gotten the knack of the whole resurrection thing, though fear not because if he can't quite *cure* you of death, he still might be able to remove some of the horror that accompanies it. the protagonists of *white noise*, bombarded physically by an "airborne toxic event" and under spiritual siege by the white noise playing out on television and radio, are desperately in search of a significant death in insignificant times. with his fluent and mordant prose, delillo once again asserts himself as a true american master, finger on the pulse of times and ear to the zeitgeist.
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