White Noise (Contemporary American Fiction)

Rating:
Summary: White Elephant
Review: The strength of DeLillo's book is not the theme of how much humans fear and obsess over their own deaths as so many past reviewers have professed. Rather, it is the nature of the relationships that abound in the non-traditional family - the ex-spouses, the stepchildren and the former in-laws. White Noise puts the Gladney family under a magnifying glass and shows how crisis and fear is exciting and terrifying, how it can bring strangers closer together and pull loved ones apart. Jack and his wife, Babette, are able to vocalize to each other their wish to die first so they don't have to bear the pain of the witnessing the other's passing knowing that theirs is next.
DeLillo in many instances forgets that he's writing a novel. A minor character will soliloquize about the American home or the purpose of advertising to brainwash the American masses. While DeLillo's takes on these subjects in undoubtedly unique and inherently interesting, it would have been better for DeLillo to deliver them with examples, using the Gladney family to act them out instead, which would have been much more captivating than the blatant statements.
The most fascinating character is Heinrich, Jack's son from a previous marriage who is reclusive and withdrawn until the "airborn toxic event" brings him out of his shell and allows him to challenge nearly everything that so many are willing to accept, not because of understanding but just because. Heinrich's arguments are brilliant, humorous and made this reader crave an argument in order to emulate Heinrich's style.
Finally, DeLillo addresses addictions. Dylar, a brand new and untested drug designed to block the human fear of their own death, becomes a central item in the book after the Jack and his stepdaughter discover that Babette is taking it secretly. Soon Jack wants it as well, and one of the last scenes in the book is a rather comedic murder with the victim tossing handfulls of the pills at his mouth as he attempts to hide from his murderer. The drug does not work and as with all addictions those who want it let their lives fall apart in the wake of trying to obtain more of it. No pleasure comes from it, yet it can't be given up.
But White Noise can be given up. It is worth the read, just not worth reading again. Give it away as a white elephant gift this Christmas. DeLillo's style is fresh enough to keep the reader's attention through the duration of the book and DeLillo kept the length of the work down to average (about 300 pages)making it a perfect weekend read.



Rating:
Summary: "Fear is therefore self-awareness raised to a higher level."
Review: WHITE NOISE muses on an inescapable subject that confronts all of us: death. The narrative swiftly zooms in and out of Jack Gladney's outward poise as an academic authority and his inward sepia maze of jittery moments, fear, and nightmare of death sweat. The text, despite its crispness and modernity, radiates an epic quality as if the novel becomes a literary event of death. Jack is the chairman and the creator of the department of Hitler Studies, a well-established system of the Nazi figure that endows the college to fame. Together with his colleague Murray, who anticipates on founding an institute evolving around Elvis on the same magnitude, they muse on death.

Happily married to the Hitler expert is Babette, who possesses a careless dignity of someone too preoccupied with serious matters to know what she looks like. She seems to be pretty content with her family life, which comprises of children from both her and his previous marriages, but, like her husband, Babette is overly death-savvy. The question haunts them: who will die first? The thought of her husband's dying first leaves an abyss in her life, and she is set to engage in a clandestine experimentation that might to lead to a pill that rids of the fear of death. As their touching unfolds against the backdrop of an airborne toxic event that sends the whole town into juggle and paranoia, WHITE NOISE exposes the human obsession with mortality and fear of death to the fullest extent.

Jack and his wife's irrational conviction to overcome the fear of death might have overleaped to the point of morbidity; but the universal fear of mortality is confirmed through the paranoid state stirred up by the chemical spill. WHITE NOISE candidly exposes people's lingering fears about themselves and those whom they love. Do they simply wear a disguise or pretend the fear is not there? Do they think indifference will drive away the fear? Do they just hide the fear from one another out of mutual consent?

Jack's sense of danger is valid in the sense that death is so vague and about which nobody knows. Death is a substatic buzz. An electrical sound. White noise like the TV fuss. A power of suggestion. On top of the social comedy and a disaster, WHITE NOISE is a philosophical musing on how death, despite its immutability and eternal threat, provides a boundary and gives a precious texture to life. Death embellishes life with a sense of definition, to guage the beauty and meaning of what a human being does in his lifetime.


Rating:
Summary: Imperfect
Review: WHITE NOISE is a book not about death, but the fear of death. It centers on a man, Jack Gladney, and his family. It's hard to figure out which of Jack's kids are from which of his several marriages, and even harder to discern their age (since all of his characters speak with the depth of a 50-year-old college professor). This all adds to the surreal feel of the book. In a way, I felt like Delillo was trying to create noise of his own. The ideas and themes and plotlines come all at once, from different angles, from different characters. There is an absurdity to it all-Jack is a professor in Hitler studies, his wife is taking a drug that helps her deal with the fear of death (something Jack desperately wants), his son's friend is trying to get into the Guiness Book of World Records by locking himself in a box with two dozen poisonous snakes, there is a train wreck and chemical spill which force the Gladneys to evacuate...It mimics the randomness of life, although everything is more dramatic in the book.

One Amazon reviewer called Delillo's style "uniquely contemporary," which I think describes it well. It is sparse, laced with sardonic humor and satire. His prose jumps from topic to topic without warning. It reads fast and kept my attention throughout. Parts of it, notably the satire of academia, are hilarious. But I felt like I was wanting either more or less of his themes. He rather heavy-handedly explores death and life through dialogue that sounds like nothing anyone would ever say (I didn't mind that aspect of it-again, it adds to the surreal nature of everything), yet repeatedly touches on consumerism but never does anything with it. I would have liked a little more development. I read WHITE NOISE because it was on some list of the top 100 contemporary novels. I'm not sure I would give it that. But it is good.

Rating:
Summary: Overrated.
Review: This book was assigned reading for my contemporary American literature class. My instructor and most of my classmates raved and said how great Delillo is, calling him a genius. I could not disgree more. First of all, his style of writing and utterly pessimistic world views are not my cup of tea, therefore alienating me from the get go. Even worse, nothing he wrote was new to me. None of his ideas were original. If an author has nothing new to tell me & writes in a stlye that doesn't appeal to me, then I feel that book is a waste of my time (and money). Why the critics embrace Delillo is beyond me. I guess some writers are just en vogue and become very overrated in certain periods, much like Hemingway or S. King. I'd avoid this if I were you and read something by Vonnegut or T. C. Boyle. If this is considered the "cream of the crop" of American contemporay literature, we might as well watch T.V.

Rating:
Summary: Fear, Death, American Culture
Review: No one is tapped into the dark underside of contemporary American culture like Don Delillo is. In White Noise, Delillo explores death and humanity's fear of death in an insightful and uniquely contemporary way. This may sound boring, but Delillo is an absolutely hilarious and fascinating writer. His philosophical dialog, while utterly unrealistic, is entertaining and astonishing in its complexity of ideas and connections. It is pure pleasure to read what his characters have to say about culture and all that it implies, especially in Delillo's conception of the new forms of dying unique to our time.

Rating:
Summary: Skims the surface, ultimately unsatisfying
Review: Jack, the chairman of Hitler studies and his extended family, wife and children from multiple marriages, live peaceful lives in Middle America. Yet they're terrified of death, and oddly estranged from the world. When an "airborne toxic event" forces a town evacuation, it gives their fears shape - even after life returns to "normal," the consequences linger inside them. This novel has passages of great black humor and touches a very real nerve in American modern life. DeLillo is like an alien looking rather fearfully at American pop culture through a telescope. Who else would describe the crackling noise of frozen plastic wrap as "strange"? I have to say my previous
critique of DeLillo, from Underworld, holds in this novel too - the dialogue is all much of a sameness: all the characters firing academic questions at one other, referring to themselves in the third person, using the same stylistic phrasings, even adolescents. Only Jack's visiting father-in-law has his own voice (perhaps because he is a nomad, a worker with his hands, removed from the "white noise"). I also find it beyond credibility that Jack, the chairman for 20-odd years of a department he invented, could not speak German. This isn't like claiming a degree you don't have. People would know. It's a funny conceit, but it doesn't ring true. This is a recurring theme in the book. All the characters are literally baffled to shock by the most quotidian disturbances in their routine - a visit from the father in law, a familiar face on TV - but why? These over-reactions grow kind of tiresome, really. DeLillo should go under the surface, beyond supermarket kitsch and TV ads, to show the real "white noise:" the pollutants, the political machinations, the incompetence behind the toxic catastrophes. It reads well: the pacing is good, and the observations keen, but due to the sameness of the dialogue and tone I found it a bit unsatisfying.

Rating:
Summary: Works as a commentary, but not really as a novel
Review: With WHITE NOISE, the Gladney family and any other characters exist primarily for the purpose of giving DeLillo a sounding board; they were created to give voice to the author's commentary on such diverse topics as comsumerism, death, religion and even the toxicity of the world we live in. As such, they serve their purpose, yet they really never come to life. They live in such a controlled environment that they seem to function more like experiments than actual people; DeLillo makes his points but his creations never achieve an existence that will capture the reader. What will fascinate is how prescient DeLillo is and how well he is able to capture so many truths about America. It is just a shame he didn't decide to do it with characters that might possibly have existed in the real world.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent on all levels; anti-post-modernists beware
Review: There isn't much to type about DeLillo's work that hasn't been typed; by now, you should already know the deal on White Noise.

It is a satiric look at the consumerism of American society through a very postmodern lens. Make no mistake, this is surreal writing. You can relate to some of the characters, but in any full, deep sense of the way like you could with a book of more traditional style. In White Noise, the characters are mere products of society, purposefully built up to be spiritually empty and mentally limited.

DeLillo's narrator is Jack Gladney, and ends up being the sole voice in the novel, an intentional device to monotonize the speech of the characters in the book and fully illustrate the dulling effect (DeLillo says) consumerism has on people. Philosophy is spouted not just from adults but from EVERYONE except the child, Wilder (an important detail) and it echoes throughout the prose. The chatter of faxes, radios and televisions pervades the text, creating a veritable literary prosopopoeia of the Title.

One should know going in, however, the DeLillo's prejudices are as numerous as his influences, and anyone who is easily offended by alternative takes on American society better get ready to be offended. Just like Pynchon, DeLillo is intent on deconstructing the idea of any sort of unified national, historical or existential persona, and the sarcasm he thrusts at concepts and norms that we are so familiar with and perhaps attached to will easily instigate anger in many.

Still, no one can deny the depth of this novel's architecture and the breadth of its commentary. I don't care if you hate intellectualism to death or if you call all postmodern authors writers of pretentious, turgid tripe--there is absolutely no denying that DeLillo's work here is complex, original and worthy of praise.

(...)

If you hate postmodernism, fine. It's not everyone's cup of tea. Maybe you'll like White Noise's commentary, maybe you'll hate it. It's not everyone's cup of tea. But a potent cup it is, rich, dark and complex in its nuances and sources. Hate it all you want, White Noise is a (at times coldly) intellectual tour-de-force of satire and commentary.

But don't worry; it's no Gravity's Rainbow.

Rating:
Summary: I suppose you had to be there...in 1985
Review: "White Noise" is a frustrating work. The baroque and entirely too self-consciously philosophical dialogue in which the characters speak mirrors the style of the prose, or is commenting upon the prose, or is meant to satirize academic discourse but in any case when embedded in the surrounding narrative it simply doesn't work as satire. One can write complex dialogue yet retain a measure of realism, but Delillo steps over the bounds many times and it became annoying (although I like the way he wove in the "chatter" of information overload in his protagonist's consciousness). As like the fiction of Pynchon, we are kept at a distance from caring about the characters by a veil of transpersonal forces and psychological Everything is layered, laden with double meanings. Delillo is a master at the terse and evocative description; the writing itself is excellent, and he does accomplish some zingers. The second part, "the Airborne Toxic Event" is compelling, and the scene at the end in which the protagonist spars with a German nun on religion is the best. But the plot is forced, I thought, with an ending which mirrors the murder of Clare Quilty in "Lolita." In all, a flawed but occasionally interesting work...