Rating: 
Summary: Fantastico!
Review: Hilarious and moving. I would have been happy to trawl through 'Underworld's 9,000-plus pages if they were all as good as the ones in this little marvel. A superb example of what a novel should be.
Rating: 
Summary: A candidate for Great American Novel
Review: Really a fantastic novel... in a nutshell: a confrontation with death by a member of a superficial and materialistic American society. Despite his scholastic credentials, the protagonist has never really given anything--let alone death--much thought before, but he has to begin its serious contemplation after a near-disaster threatens his town.This novel has served as a precursor to so much of what has happened in the world today. Little did DeLillo know that his mockery of the news media and their "naming" of events would come to life after 9/11 when the media titled news events for our easier consumption..."America Under Attack"..."America Fights Back"...America Eats a Pie" Nor could DeLillo have seen how much more pre-occupied Americans would become with their "stuff" after his novel's publication. Yet this novel also anticipated the United States's continuing obsession with all of the stuff of life (in lieu of any search for a deeper meaning). An absolutely fabulous portrait of us as we are. I use it often in my Intro to Lit classes.
Rating: 
Summary: Too Cute For Comfort
Review: Cute. Too much so, for the most part. White Noise is filled mostly with short, sharp witticisms made not only by the narrator, but also by virtually every character that says anything at all. Perhaps this is one of those modern literature pieces that are trying to demonstrate the "absurdity of existence" or something like that. I certainly didn't get the feeling that there was an actual dialogue going on most of the time, even most of the book consisted of conversations between the protagonist. It was more like a sequence of one liners carefully strung together. It didn't have to be this way, and I'm sure many readers will disagree with my assessment. The main problem standing in the way of my great enjoyment was that everything was overblown (except the ending, which was just pointless). Everyone was too witty, and made too many too sharp observations, asked too many too biting questions, with too many too strange personalities showing up. The best-handled running theme was the narrator's occupation. Being the founder of a department of Hitler Studies is just weird enough to be amusing, but not so strange as to be off the deep end of absurdity. Nor was it brought up more often than needed. Too much would have been for Don DeLillo to make his main character's best friend the would-be founder of a department of Elvis Studies, and have the two characters deliver a duel lecture comparison of Hitler to Elvis to help get the new department founded. Oh, wait, he did do that. One of the reasons I like the works of Dostoyevsky so much is that so many of the characters are just a little bit nuts. It's too bad DeLillo couldn't make his point, whatever it was supposed to be, without losing perspective. This wasn't a bad novel, and I was rather entertained by it, but it was an overblown piece of work signifying very much less than was probably intended.
Rating:
Summary: Dated, 80ish writing and humor
Review: This book is sorely dated. What might have been hip and humorous in the 80s is sadly anachronistic today. Hitler Studies, toxic spill drills, dysfunctional families, all the devices that made this story a page turner in '85 reads like a festpool of cliches today. Nabakov's Lolita deals with similar themes but is a far superior book that is as fresh today as when it was released. Read White Noise nevertheless for what critics and audiences thought was groundbreaking stuff in the 80s.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best novels to explore contemporary life
Review: In fifty years, White Noise by Don DeLillo will perhaps explain our almost demented times better than any other novel. The story centers around Jack Gladney, the chairman and founder of [German dictator] Studies at a rural university. He lives with his fourth wife, Babette, two children and two step-children in a labyrinth of junk hauled home from the local[store]. After a toxic waste spill in his neighborhood, Jack is overwhelmed by his fear of [end of life], one problem that no commercial product can solve --- or so he thinks. Throughout the story DeLillo shows almost frightening understanding of contemporary life. Supermarkets are churches; brand names are mantras; Elvis is worthy of academic interest; truth is buried by the endless hum of the (over)information age and the family as an institution struggles to hold on amidst the onslaught of changes, each more absurd than the last. One of the most unabashed and insightful dissections of life at the end of the twentieth century, White Noise is a masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: not bad
Review: i just finished reading white noise by don delillo. this is the first book by delillo that i have read, and i really wasn't dissappointed. as far as entertainment goes, delillo does and awesome job. he managed to fit an airborn toxic event, crazy scientists, love affairs, attempted murder and more into this novel and it works. as far as theme goes, he did a fine job as well. he maintains his messages throughout the entirety of the novel and sticks a quirky character, murray, in to clarify for us. it was definately worth the read.
Rating: 
Summary: Pynchon comparisons odious and highly misleading
Review: What can I say? I don't read contemporary novels. I've been creeping toward more modern novels and had just read and was floored by Thomas Pynchon's book 'V.'. There is no basis for comparison here. White Noise does not stand up to the test of time even 20 years after it was written. Some of the concepts may have been ahead of their time, but they seem trite in retrospect. This is a light-weight throw away that has nothing important to say, although it desperately tries, about the human condition. I didn't find it particulary amusing, thought-provoking, or challenging and I didn't feel any compassion toward the main character as he spiraled toward the thinly-veiled conclusion. Better him than me.
Rating: 
Summary: Parody at its worst
Review: The author is so caught up saying something about modern society, he forgets that he is telling a story. The characters are weak and poorly written. The plot is so thin, I could see through the pages.
A theme from this book is the placebo effect, but I think its ironic that this very book has its own placebo effect. Some people seem to actually trick themselves into thinking there is a story that is worth telling in this book. To these people I would say, "I have some sugar pills that cure whatever ails you." The fact is there was no story at all.
Rating:
Summary: Orwell for the 21st Century
Review: Fractured families, airborne toxic events, happy pills, misinformation, existentialism in malls, and a meditation on Death -- these are just some of the themes in what's at the same time an impossibly funny novel whose relevance to our lives deepens with each step we take into the new millennium. If you can't appreciate this novel, you're blissfully lost in the system. And that's fine too.
Rating:
Summary: A master of observation and analysis.
Review: Forget trying to figure out what this book is "about". Forget the silly attempts to outline the plot or analyze the characters. In fact, drop all that stuff you learned in 8th-grade book-report class -- Delillo is the kind of writer that makes all these literary concepts passé. Read this book for what it is - a hilarious, inventive work of fiction written by a master of observation and analysis. DeLillo's genius is in creating a world that is wholly familiar but at the same time completely alien. That's what make his riffs so compelling: it's all stuff we've seen before, but he show it to us differently - clearer, vaguer, more skewed and more accurate. Who hasn't witnessed one of those surreal diningroom table exercises where family members offer up factoids and data points, all of which are half-true products of misremembered newspaper articles and PBS specials. DeLillo's take: "The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation."
Then there's the modern state of staying busy with shopping, pop-culture, tabloid promises of relief, absurd attempts at fame (is snake-sitter Orest Mercator the prototype for "Jackass" or what?). Running throughout is a dark undercurrent: the feeling that we are living under a vague, deadly and omnipresent threat that we can't quite identify -- all we know is that it involves some combination of government agencies, toxic chemicals and the media. Read this book once, twice, three times. You'll laugh out loud, throw the book across the room, shake your head in disbelief and wonder -- but you'll never forget you're reading the work of a true literary genius.
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