Rating: 
Summary: Comedic Campus Chronicle Clicks
Review: Technology is changing the inner experience of human beings. In White Noise, Don DeLillo shows us how this is done. Waves and radiation. Television serves as kind of new collective unconscious, creating a new inner frame of reference. Jack Gladney says at one point, "His skin was a color that I want to call flesh-toned." Stephie murmurs, "Toyota Celica," in her sleep. The TV is now a member of the family. We are moving toward a post-modern mentality.Jack Gladney is, at best, an unlikely hero, I think. He is professor of "Hitler Studies" at a great American college; an academic who is comically humanized off of the pedestal of academia to the reader. He teaches the incarnation of death and national propaganda, and then comes home to a mundane and motley family crew of ditzy third wife, step-children, and biological children deeply rooted in the national propaganda of America. The extreme superficiality of his life is astounding. Everything is meant to *seem* significant...Hitler studies, the robes and sunglasses, the most photographed barn in America. Like so much of what we see and hear nowadays...what it's about is *sounding* like it's about something important. Everything is sense impression. Never mind what a word really means...if it *sounds* solid and strong, then that's reason enough to use it. In this way we escape from nature. We create lives that "protect" us from the things that are "out there" somewhere. "I'm not just a college professor," says Jack. "I'm the head of a department. I don't see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That's for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the country, where the fish hatcheries are." As a metafictional Heidegerrian test, White Noise is a cross between life and narrative, death and narrative closure. Delillo's narrative closure is that death may go a little way toward explaining why some are dissatisfied with his endings.
As DeLillo puts it, "All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games. We edge nearer death every time we plot." If one accepts this, or accepts that DeLillo believes this, then it's hard to imagine how his endings (death) could be "satisfying" or why they (it) should be. In light of this, can the narrative interruptions that pepper the text ("Krylon, Rust-Oleum, Red Devil") be seen as attempts to stave off the death that the narrative compels us toward, that the end of the book will bring? And what to make of the fact that most of these narrative interruptions are drawn from TV and advertising? I wonder about the role of children, particularly Wilder, in White Noise. Murray suggests a couple of times that the way to deal with the onslaught of TV is to view TV as a child views it. Children's consciousness, he seems to believe, has evolved to a state where they can absorb this onslaught without being troubled by it. If this is true, though, why does Wilder (remember his crying jag) seem to be the most sensitive individual in the book? And why do the other children seem less like children than like small adults? Even our language is adulterated and attenuated to protect us from confronting horror directly. In the Gladney household each family member corrects another with a further error. An exaggerated chronicle of the ludicrousness of modern America.
Rating: 
Summary: At least he got the title right
Review: White Noise is supposed to be a book about our relationship to death: our fear of it and our fascination with it. It is supposed to raise deep and troublesome questions. Note the keyword "supposed." It should, but doesn't. The story, in as far as there is one, is dull and implausible. The characters are incomplete and shallow (with the exception of Heinrich, who sometimes comes alive). The dialogue is overly clever and strangely artificial. With this backdrop it should come as no surprise that the question of death is presented in a clumsy way. We never really have any reason to care about it, or the heartless creatures that so unconvincingly claim to be obsessed with it. I hate to admit it, but White Noise left me cold. Why then three stars instead of one, you may ask? Language. DeLillo may not have a story to tell, but he tells it anyhow, and he does it so elegantly you almost let him get away with it.
Rating: 
Summary: White Tripe
Review: My edition of White Noise is packaged in Penguin's "Great Books of the 20th Century" series. While the moniker is an interesting marketing tool, it's not an accurate one. The novel certainly resonates in places: it's richly ironic, it expresses many of our cultural fears, on occasion it's humorous. As a cultural critique, it was ahead of it's time--Douglas Copeland, for one, in Generation X, makes a similar critique; DeLillo, of course, preceded him. But, in the end--what a bore. The prose is indulgent--to wit: "We went our separate ways into the store's deep interior. A great echoing din, as of the extinction of a species of beast, filled the vast space." The prose is purple: "The time of the spiders arrived. Spiders in high corners of rooms. Cocoons wrapped in spiderwork. Silvery dancing strands that seemed the pure play of light, light as evanescent news, ideas borne on light." Yikes. After 300 pages, I felt so exhausted. The novel is so unrelenting--it drums on and on to its inevitable conclusion--with neither surprise, revelation or even a nuance. I felt rather robbed of the time I'd spent reading it.
Rating: 
Summary: Thought-provoking and very noisy
Review: A biting, satirical look at the hyper-consumerist,wave-radiating, static-filled, information overloaded, chemically suffused predicament of American family life, where even something as elemental as the fear of death has been reduced to a drug treatable medical condition. A society so benumbed by plastic technology that reality - a noxius chemical cloud billowing over the city - is treated as a simulated "airborne toxic event"! Here children are desensitised to childhood wonders and fight for larger causes, while adults live in constant dread of the bogeyman of mortality. In such a world some, like college lecturer Murray, invert the natural order of things: they find existential meaning and deep spirituality in the icons of American pop-culture and brand consumerism. DeLillo's post-modernist take on contemperory living makes the whole novel run very much like a television show. Background radio noise, product-placement ads, sports commentary, sit-com dialogue all intrude into the narrative at awkward moments, leaving a subliminal buzz in the reader. This, I suppose, is the white noise of the title, but DeLillo has made some kind of music out of it.
Rating:
Summary: disappointing, again
Review: White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at a small college. He's on his fourth wife, Babbette and has four kids and what I think most of us would say is an excessive fear of modern life and of his own death. Of the book Mr. DeLillo has said : [A]ll I can say about White Noise...is that the book is driven by a connection I sensed between advanced technology and contemporary fear. By the former I don't mean bombs and missiles alone but more or less everything -- microwaves, electrical insulation etc. One would have to write a long dense essay to explain this connection adequately -- that's why I wrote a loose-limbed and shadow-sliding work of fiction. As it happens, Jack's fear of technology turns out to be justified when a toxic chemical cloud is unleashed in the area and he is terminally poisoned. But it is in his fear of death that I think Mr. DeLillo loses his way. Jack fears death precisely because he believes in nothing. For such a person the self is all that matters, so the prospect of one's own death must be terrifying. For with your own death the world, for all intents and purposes, comes to an end. Your own death is the Apocalypse. Now, Jack has a friend, Murray Jay Siskind, who serves as kind of the Greek chorus of the book. When Jack is dying, Murray tells him : "I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don't have the disposition, the rage or whatever it takes to be a killer. We let death happen. We lie down and die. But think what it's like to be a killer. Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number ofÊ massacres, wars, executions." This theory also explains much of the 20th century--from genocide to abortion--if we accept that murder has become a way for a people who no longer believe in anything beyond themselves to try to pretend that they have some kind of power over death. But it is of course a delusion. All the murders in the world--as Jack's subject, Hitler, demonstrates--won't extend your life by one minute. And even if they could, what would be the point, since we've already decided that our lives are meaningless? So what Mr. DeLillo has done here is to set up an elaborate joke. We can see how foolish these beliefs are and how destructive. It's clear that such theories, though intended to empower us, have left us empty; our lives dissatisfying; our mortality devastating, even though inevitable; and the morality which once gave our lives a sense of purpose discardedso that we may pursue personal pleasures which fail to fulfill. surely the point of the novel, after all this, must be that this is all a huge mistake. Right? We have to have been building to the moment when Toto rips away the curtain and the post-modern Wizard is exposed as a fraud, haven't we? The answer, inexplicably, is : no. And so we feel the air rush out of the balloon just as we thought Mr. DeLillo was ready to let it fly. Jack does indeed try to claim a life credit by hunting down the quack who's been giving the drug Dylar--sort of an anticipation of Prozac that quiets fears--to Babbette. But there's nothing empowering about the scene; it's merely embarrassing. When Jack takes himself and his victim, both wounded, to the hospital, he meets a nun, Sister Hermann Marie. He questions her about her faith, but she reveals that the religious have none either, their seeming piety is all an act : "It is for others. Not for us." "But that's ridiculous. what others?" "All the others. The others who spend their lives believing that we still believe. It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely, the human race would die. This is why we are here.Ê A tiny minority. To embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse." It is here that Mr. DeLillo goes too far because he shows us that the joke is apparently on him.Ê He seems to be a Jack Gladney, believing nothing, obsessed with death, one of T.S. Eliot's hollow men. That suffices to make him ridiculous, but he goes beyond that to claim that those who are not withered up must be pretending to believe in something, and to claim that even the pretend believers are a tiny minority, dwarfed by the more honest unbelievers. This is simply untrue, at least here in America, where the great majority have utterly traditional and conventional religious beliefs and a certainty that every life has a purpose.. The extreme skeptics though have always been a part of Western Civilization and they always will be. For the perverse truth is that we can not even prove that we exist, that we are not merely a dream. Actually, no one has yet bettered Samuel Johnson's amusing but unsatisfactory response when asked how he would refute Hume or Berkeley's theory that we can not know with certainty that anything exists. Dr. Johnson turned and kicked a boulder, saying : "I refute it thus!" But not even the skeptics (and Johnson was one) can accept the implications of their own ideas, else they'd give up. They'd certainly not try to communicate ideas if those ideas mean nothing. If the post-modernists had the courage of their convictions they not write, and even the best of them, an Albert Camus or a Don DeLillo, would not be much missed. GRADE : C
Rating:
Summary: DeLillo at his best
Review: This is the fourth book I have read by DeLillo and easily the best. Although not perfect, this is a very good work filled with humor and cleverness. Although sparse in story, this book makes up for it with satirical insights. The main character heads a department of Hitler Studies and has a hoard of past and present spouses and children passing through his life. Strange chemical spills have effects that could kill if old age doesn't do the job first. Real disasters are used to practice for simulated ones. In short, White Noise portrays an absurd world that is close to our own. For a person who has never read DeLillo, this is a good introduction as it is clearer than some of his other works. There is the possibility of letdown with his other books, but that should not prevent you from enjoying this work.
Rating:
Summary: Touching and Funny
Review: Don DeLillo is a fine author and "White Noise" captures his ironic tone and biting wit well. While not my favorite of his works ("Underworld" captures that prize, at least so far), I still very much enjoyed losing myself in DeLillo's lovely words and finely etched characters.
Rating:
Summary: Diers and Killers
Review: I recently finished Don DeLillo's "White Noise" for the third time. The first time, as a high schooler, it seemed like a harsh condemnation of mass media and its effect on our everyday lives. The second time, as an undergraduate, it seemed like a post-modern meta-fiction, concerned with breaking down the barriers between author, protagonist, and reader. The third time, as someone recently out of school, it seemed like a well-constructed family drama, only through the eyes of the Gladneys, a rather modern and iconoclastic family. But all three times, with increasing certainty every time I read it, I knew that there was one thing "White Noise" was really about: death. For this last read I made a point of noting whenever death is mentioned. In the first thirty pages alone we have the following: * Page 4: traffic on an expressway outside the Gladney house sounds like, "dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream." * Page 6: Babette Gladney, matriarch, says of the rich mothers and fathers dropping their sons and daughters off at the University where her husband works: "I have trouble imagining death at that income level." * Page 30: Jack Gladney, patriarch, sums up his marriage: " Babette and I have... spoken deep into the night about... awakenings, old loves, old fears (except fear of death)." * Page 15 & 30: The novel's central question is said out loud: "Who will die first?" It goes on like this throughout the course of the book. Death is everywhere: in the television set, in the course that Jack teaches, and, most explicitly, in the aftermath of an industrial accident. The accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event", to quote the euphemism DeLillo expertly creates, which hangs like a pall over the innocent small town. It is this sequence, 50 pages that comprise the book's middle third, in which DeLillo's writing really shines. Like the Polo Grounds scenes from his "Underworld", DeLillo constructs another wicked set piece. This chapter precisely nails the fear, paranoia, and black comic nature of the event. Everything that comes after is somehow different. In Jack Gladney, DeLillo has created a narrator with a deadpan wit, a capacity for startling self-realization, and an intense fear at his lack of immunity against the world's dangers. Jack's life work is a course he created in Hitler studies. It is touches like this that elevate the story told from the realm of reality (would such a thing ever exist in the post-PC age?) to the realm of the hyper-real. We see it in the way the characters talk (most explicitly in Jack's ultra-verbose children, each wiser beyond his/her years than the last), in the way they live their lives (Babette busies herself by reading tabloid newspapers to the blind elderly), and in the cacophony of noise that surrounds them. This last point gives the novel its name. For it is the white noise that emanates from the TV set, from the radio, and from the loudspeaker at the supermarket, that hides the fear of death that acts as the novel's powerful subtext. DeLillo delights in periodically breaking away from the action at hand to quote the white noise. A conversation between a father and a daughter about the father's inability to hold down a job is suddenly interrupted, apropos of nothing, by: "... a British voice [from upstairs, presumably the TV set, which says]: 'There are forms of vertigo that do not include spinning.'" And then the conversation continues as if nothing has happened. Sometimes these interruptions aren't even audible to the characters in the book. Only the reader can hear them (such as the scene where Jack ruminates on the look and appearance of a mystery man who may or may not be having an affair with his wife; half a page of paranoid suppositions is concluded by just one Tourettic word: "Panasonic"). They can be very jarring when first encountered, but once you understand what DeLillo is doing, it makes perfect sense. Pay attention to the ephemera, for it holds much meaning. Many of the novel's more flavourful scenes are composed like semantic discussions. After pondering the effects of a near-aircrash, Jack notes that: "Certain elements in the crew had decided to pretend that it was not a crash but a crash landing that was seconds away. After all, the difference between the two is only one word... How much could one word matter?" A later scene finds him explaining to his wife that a fire captain car sped by their house, a loudspeaker asking people to evacuate after the toxic spill. Babette, obviously in no mood to leave, counters with, "In other words you didn't have an opportunity to notice the subtle edges of intonation." Was the captain ordering them, or expressing an opinion? In the Gladney world, such subtle differences matter. They are the stuff that literally separates life and death. Most wonderfully is a scene during the evacuation procedure, when Jack realizes that the people in charge are from a company expert in evacuation simulations. After a conversation with a particularly blase official, Jack asks, "Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?" Semantics rule the day, and inform "White Noise" at the expense of all else. There's so much more here that I haven't touched on: Jack's colleague Murray and his endless interesting theories; the various relationships between Jack, his multiple ex-wives (who all seem to be involved in the intelligence industry) and their irregularly named offspring (Heinrich, Wilder, etc.); the boy who wants to sit in a cage with deadly snakes for 60 days, to break a record and define himself. I'll leave that for you to discover like I did. Of course I can't claim to have discovered everything. In fact, I can't wait for my fourth read, to further fill in the gaps of this wonderful, multi-layered, and surprisingly funny novel.
Rating:
Summary: The Dystopia that is American Culture
Review: With White Noise, Don Delillo creates a powerful satire one the real nature of American culture and in influences creating it. The images are astounding. The humor is biting, but truly funny. Delillo is a genius. The world he presents is one dominated my the media. The is an amazing passage where a young girl, in an almost religious experience, says the words "Toyota Celica" in her sleep. Families here can only spend time together watching tv. They cannot connect. There people are driven to escape thier own deaths. They immerse themselves in excess (particularly of sex). They try to forget their identities using drugs. They try to escape their identities by conforming to the same one as everyone els. They relish watching disasters on tv and in real life because it affirms their own life. They cannot feel mercy or love for other humans. The dominant attitude about violence and death is "better you than me." The world has lost the ability to deal with death (and life) because the world presented is losing religion. Man needs these absolute truths to give stucture to their lives, but Delillo shows the world it losing to technology and a relativistic viewpoint. Here morality is being lost. Delillo presents a total Wasteland. The novel is a very apt look at America today, and it is every bit as scary as Brave New World. White Noise is a powerful novel with so much to say to America today.
Rating:
Summary: A little research can lead to better understanding...
Review: White Noise was published in 1985 to great critical acclaim - it won the National Book Award and, more importantly, opened up DeLillo's work to new readers. More than anything, it established DeLillo as one of the most important contemporary writers. DeLillo claims his main inspiration for Jack Gladney's obsessive fear of death was Ernest Becker's 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction work, The Denial of Death, in which Becker argues that man's attempt to deny the fact of his own death is his major impulse. While this idea could hold true in any period, DeLillo makes it all the more relevant by examining the "white noise" of modern death that lends the novel its title, the reminders of our death that lurk beneath our technological society. More specifically, DeLillo explores the notion of simulacra (something that resembles something else or, in other words, simulations) in American society. In 1983, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote Simulations. In it, he maintains that the postmodern world privileges simulacra over reality; we believe our secondary, simulated reality is more real than first-degree reality. His classic example is that Disneyland, a fantasy world, seems more real to us than the real world. DeLillo utilizes this idea throughout White Noise, focusing on a nation reared on the simulated reality of the media which even had a former actor (Ronald Reagan) as President at the time. DeLillo says the idea for White Noise came to him while he watched television news, and realized that toxic spills were becoming such a daily occurrence that no one the news cared about them -- only those affected by the spills cared. We can see this idea play out in the airborne toxic event in White Noise, when people are upset that the media pays their crisis little attention, but it emerges in subtler ways when DeLillo examines the consumerist, technological atmospheres of death we create for ourselves -- from our living rooms to our cars to our supermarkets. DeLillo also takes a look at several more typically postmodern ideas -- ambiguity of identity, waste, racial heterogeneity, the family -- and gives them his astute, humorous spin. Though most readers find his view of American society harsh and pessimistic, others see the ending of White Noise -- with its bonding through consumerism in the face of death -- as subversively uplifting. Although it might be a little too much to wade through as a "light read," White Noise should definitely be added to everyone's "to read" list.
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