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Summary: what happened?
Review: i thoughtit was pretty borign and nothing exciting ever happened
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Summary: Days of Dylarama
Review: Brilliant. Thought provoking. Best novel I've ever read.
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Summary: Brilliant and funny
Review: This is a terrific book, funny and closely observed, that is wonderful in its take on modern life and family interaction. When focusing on the family, DeLillo gives us a tight inward world, with its own vernacular and personal obsessions, that shuts out a world permeated with the presence of Hitler, failed marriages, and the vague threats of modern life, which in "White Noise" take the tangible presence of "an airborne toxic event." The rendering of family was especially remarkable in chapter 17, where a family goes on a shopping spree at the mall, and in chapter 31, where a family eats a drive-in meal in their car. As usual with DeLillo, there is brilliant writing. Here's just one example (page 34): " I watched Denise make a mental comparison between her mother's running clothes and the wet bag she dumped in the compactor. I could see it in her eyes, a sardonic connection. It was these secondary levels of life, these extrasensory flashes and floating nuances of being, these pockets of rapport forming unexpectedly, that made me believe we were a magic act, adults and children together, sharing unaccountable things."
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Summary: Very Entertaining, but a Short Half Life
Review: I read this book for an english class in college. This was the most modern book we read in the class and was probably the most entertaining to read. DeLillo is extraordinarily funny. His writing parallels today's society although it is a decade older. His consumeristic view point leads the reader from one token of modernization to another. While one might laugh at the absurdity of the characters one is at the same time comparing those characters to him or herself. However, the brilliance of this novel is short lived. Although DeLillo shows us how to laugh at ourselves he does little else. The reader is left with little more than a few chuckles and disbelief. I have found that attempting a thorough analysis of this text is the quickest prescription for an aneurysm.
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Summary: White Noise
Review: This book was introduced a few months ago to me in an American Lit class and I've been looking for Delillo books ever since. The title points to the mass media bombardment that this family goes through as they try to live their consumer driven lives. Jack teaches Hitler Studies and as the preeminent scholar in the field (he pretty much built it as a discipline) he is haunted by his own inadequacies as both a family figure and a teacher. The fact that he doesn't know German becomes a huge insecurity. His family is completely disfunctional--A wife that combats her own morbid fears, a daughter that searches for some way to experience things by repeatedly burning her morning toast, and a nihilist pre-pubescent son who contrives ways of disbelieving everything the family structure tells him. Delillo shows how media has become the standard by which this family lives its life through a terrible tragedy and how the community feeds off of its own fears. I love this book and have found Delillo, along with others such as Stephen Wright, to be hitting the nail directly on the head when it comes to what life has become for most people in America.
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Summary: Emotional allergens
Review: A recent article I read suggested that scientists are on the verge of proving that allergies are caused by overly clean households in an individual's youth-- the product of a dysfunctional immune system with too little to do. This, I think, could be analagous to the condition of the troubled characters of White Noise. Their anxiety is never borne of anything specific-- yet always exists, manifest in different ways-- in a culture that has removed itself from any kind of real emotional and physical contact, good or bad. Both the allergies and DeLillo's postmodern condition occur only in the suburbs of industrialized countries. Allergies didn't even exist until the industrial revolution, when people first flocked to cities and began the process of distancing themselves from nature, and to this day, they are still most prevalent in middle-class suburbanites. Farmers and the poor don't get them. DeLillo's prose mirrors the distance his suburbanites feel-- he is a master at suggesting meaning without ever spelling it out, even in the most mundane sentences. Like his characters, the narration itself seems to search for intimacy and meaning. That's what makes it such a joy to read: few writers synthesize prosaic style, characters and content so effortlessly.
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Summary: Not for the faint of heart
Review: This is a brilliant book. I admit that I am a VERY jaded reader and a cynic at heart; any whiff of sentimentality turns me off. What Dellilo offers in White Noise is dead-on: neither satire nor straight realism, it is a brilliantly accurate reflection of life in the "informational age." The scene where Jack and his son discuss wether it is raining or not is hilarious and frightening. Read it; laugh, cringe; pass it on.
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Summary: Good job but couldn't captiavte me
Review: This book is tough for me to review, because I both liked it and became bored by it. Delilo's language and style is fresh. He did an excellent job creating the feeling of the modern, it's relationships and themes. And it is a funny book in an absurd, pathetic way. The difficulty I had with the story was with the characters. I couldn't seem to get into a Hitler professor, an aging stair climber, know it all health concious kids, or the "white noise" cloud surrounding their lives. It's probably me, I live in a cabin in Alaska very far away from Delilo's White Noise. I recognize, and I think he did a good job depicting it, the story just didn't hold my interest. Mixed review.
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Summary: BLEAK, FUNNY, SHOCKING: ONE OF DELLILLO'S FINEST MOMENTS
Review: White Noise is probably one of the best books I have ever read. It does not serve as entertainment; you don't pick this up for a read on the train. Instead, it serves as a slap in the face, disposing traditional conventions and giving way to his admirably ironic and philosophical view of modern day consumerism and death. It is vitamins for the brain. This satire about modern day society poses thought provoking questions. Our obsession with pop-culture is peerlessly examined and the results are enlightening. And why are we afraid of death? Delillo shows us the way to our graves and gives us a chance to attempt to understand demise and doom. White Noise is so sad, so full of eloquence and so deep. I read this book nearly a year ago and to this date it remains fresh in my mind. It is so well written and artful. There are so many piercingly shocking observations into modern day America. The idiosyncracies are so lovable yet disturbing and they ring true. The narrative is fresh and powerful, overwhelming and explosive; the main character and his family so eerily familiar, the dialogue so evocative and perplexing. Every chapter shines in its brilliance, every sentence has words carefully chosen for maximum psychological impact. The plot itself borders the line of being ridiculous and shallow, so people who want their thrillers and mysteries, you might wish to look elsewhere. But those of you who want something more challenging and rewarding, look no further. White Noise is a mind blowing trip to the finish. You will never look at life the same way again.
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Summary: Fear of Death and Other Celebrated Acts of Disaster
Review: The world encapsulated in DeLillo's White Noise is a gas powered consumerist wasteland bordered on the fringes by intellectual pondering and postmodernist parallels. It is in a constant vortex, shaping and reshpaing itself against a backdrop of supermarket commoditites, media misinformations, and the filtering of the human condition through radio and television samplings. However, behind this curtain of shrink-wrapped satisfaction and pre-packaged purpose, there lies a furtive cloud of danger, always growing in malevolent proportions. A consumerist death spreads it's ameobic presence throughout the text. It is our own refuse, overt consumption, and brand name ideology that manifests itself into DeLillo's 'airborne tovic event'. From an obsession with disaster, and disaster footage, bordering on fetishism, to a toxic mass embodying our transgessions, to a drug designed specifically with the intent of eliminating the fear of death, the results of overindulgence are visible, both literally and figuratively. One of the most relevant works to date, this book defies all categorization!
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