Nov 2024 Reread: They just don't make stylized prose like this anymore. It's laugh out loud funny and yet, nearly four decades after its publication, it's never not relevant. It has truly gone triple platinum on my bookshelves.

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Unashamedly, this is a favorite. There is nothing more absurdly and quintessentially American than the idea of a Hitler Studies Department. Just look at how America treats Zionism. I love this book, but Don DeLillo remains a one-hit wonder for me. Over the years, I've tried picking up other books from him, but none will ever touch White Noise.

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"I understand the music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes."

"It's the only avant-garde we've got."

\\n

This review beautifully captures the essence of White Noise. The author's enthusiasm for the book is palpable, highlighting its unique style and enduring relevance. The comparison to a triple platinum record on the bookshelves emphasizes its significance and popularity. The mention of the absurdity of a Hitler Studies Department adds a touch of humor and a thought-provoking perspective on American culture. The admission that DeLillo is a one-hit wonder for the reviewer, despite attempts to read his other works, further emphasizes the special place that White Noise holds. The quoted dialogue from the book provides a tantalizing glimpse into its witty and insightful nature. Overall, this review makes a strong case for the continued appeal of White Noise and leaves the reader eager to explore the book for themselves.

It is truly nice to dwell in the land of plenty. Here, food is treated as merchandise, technology is regarded as merchandise, health is seen as merchandise, education is considered merchandise, and culture is also commodified. Everything seems to be mass-produced and of second-rate quality. And yet, despite having an abundance of these things, one simply can't consume it all.

Heinrich's hairline is beginning to recede, which makes me wonder. Did his mother ingest some sort of gene-piercing substance during pregnancy? Am I in some way to blame? Have I, unwittingly, raised him near a chemical dump site, in the path of air currents that carry industrial wastes capable of causing scalp degeneration, while also enjoying glorious sunsets? (People claim that the sunsets around here were not nearly as breathtaking thirty or forty years ago.) Man's guilt throughout history and within the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, which brings with it the daily seeping of falsehearted death.

Consuming has become equated with living. However, consuming too much turns one's thoughts into an annoying white noise. And then, thanatomania and thanatophobia start to creep in. In this land of plenty, there seems to be nowhere to run.

I had a babysitter named Bernice, who was also the postmistress of our small, wind-swept Kansas town. My mom would drop me off at the post office, and I'm quite certain that using it as a daycare might have violated some regulations. But this was small-town America, after all. Bernice was extremely religious and had an obsession with death. She managed to convince me that she had a pact with GOD, and when her time came, she would ascend on a cloud just like Jesus Christ.

She told me that if I prayed fervently, I too could receive this magnificent non-death and get my own cloud ride to heaven.

It was only a few weeks later that I committed my first felony at the age of 4. Bernice was taking an unusually long time in the bathroom, and while she was distracted, I filled my pockets with every coin from the wooden box cash register and walked the quarter-mile home. I was building a town on the kitchen table, consisting of a church (cathedral), post office, gas station, and grocery store - all the buildings I knew existed in my rather limited universe. My building material was these wonderful cylindrical metal pieces that I had taken from the post office.

I was new to this criminal life and didn't realize that the first place they look for you after a crime is at your house. Sure enough, I was caught. The adults were really excited about something. I gave them my best innocent look.

Bernice wagged her finger at me and furrowed her brow. She leaned over and whispered in my ear, "you just lost your cloud." Those five words had a profound impact on me. All the yelling and threats had bounced off me like marshmallow bullets, but those words started the waterworks, and a sense of guilt wrapped in a furry fear blanket was born.

The story then transitions to Jack and Babette Gladney, an odd but loving couple with odd, hyper-intelligent children. Jack teaches a class on Hitler at the university, and Babette reads tabloids to blind people. Their lives are going well until a growing fear of death starts to create cracks in their relationship and put strain on the family. They are not only afraid of death but also of dying last. Each wants to depart before the other.

Then an airborne toxic event arrives in town. They are forced to evacuate their home, and Jack becomes exposed to the deadly toxic cloud. This changes his fears from not knowing when or how he will die to having a more immediate and realized version of his death. He consults experts and thinks about what it means to be dead.

Babette answers an ad in the newspaper for an experimental drug that will chemically alter a person's perception of death, making them forget they are going to die. She starts to experience memory loss and erratic behavior. Jack keeps asking questions, and the kids want answers. Finally, she confesses. This moment in the book is a real punch to the kidneys for me. Babette's level of betrayal, which adds more complexity to the plot, was completely unexpected.

Once Jack learns the truth about the pills, even knowing the side effects, he wants them. He wants to forget. He takes a pill to his friend Winnie to be analyzed. She tells him it is a remarkable piece of engineering, but there is no actual medicine in the tablet. Jack lurches onward in his search for the magic pill and becomes increasingly unstable as he spends more time in his own mind, obsessed with a future death rather than living in the present.

The dialogue between the Gladney family is one of the highlights of the book. The kids are intently seeking the truth, while the adults are desperately trying to avoid it. I could have included many great one-liners in this review, but I decided not to, as I don't like it when trailers give away the best lines in comedic movies. I struggled with the scoring for this book. I was at 3 stars halfway through, then jumped to 5 stars. I went to bed thinking 4 stars, and this morning I've decided to stick with 5 stars for now. The book is full of little gems and pockets of philosophy that left me with lingering doubts about my own beliefs. Understanding a character like Jack goes a long way towards understanding many aspects of life. I both adore and fear my mind, as it knows too much about me.

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This is truly one of the most disappointing reading experiences I've had in a long while. In fact, it's hands down the most disappointing of the year. I had been eagerly anticipating this book for years, only to find that it failed to live up to the expectations set by the great novel it was advertised as.

On the positive side, there's no denying that it's well-written. DeLillo clearly has an excellent understanding of contemporary society. The novel is divided into three parts or "acts", and the second part is by far the best. It manages to capture the essence of the story in a more engaging way.

However, on the negative side, the dialog is simply ridiculous and completely unrealistic. This is a problem that has plagued some of DeLillo's other novels, such as Zero K, but it's even more pronounced in this book. Different characters constantly say "It's obvious", as if their minds are synchronized. Entire conversations consist of things that normal people would never say in real life. There are books that are criticized for having characters who act solely as megaphones to convey the author's own views on certain topics, and in my opinion, White Noise is one of those books.

I also didn't have much interest in any of the characters. It's not that they weren't well-developed; some of them were. But they are just incredibly boring and ordinary people, making it difficult to find them interesting or to care about them or their lives. These aspects really rubbed me the wrong way, and ultimately, this wasn't a very enjoyable book to read for the most part because of them.

Brilliant! This is a top-notch social satire that delves deep into the fear of death and its profound impact on one's life. In a world consumed by modernity, we become paranoid about everything we hear and are told through the radio and TV. The addition of the airborne toxic event only heightens the darkly comical and paranoid behavior of the Gladney family.

Here lies the heart of the story: a family in crisis, leading to some rather over-the-top behavior. During their college town exodus, Jack is briefly exposed to the noxious air, which alters his life expectancy. The chemical cloud may dissipate, but the stranglehold of the fear of death, the white noise, persists and paralyzes both Jack and his wife Babette.

The dialogue in this novel is simply superb! It's perhaps the best I've encountered in a DeLillo work. The family moments, like the bickering between parents and siblings, are at times uproariously funny, reminiscent of countless American sitcoms. In a sense, once we enter the second half of the book, it's as if DeLillo is channel-surfing through a book, presenting us with the news, sci-fi, the movie channel, and a sitcom.

On a more serious note, despite being mostly a humorous read, DeLillo always remains close to basic human instincts. The portrayal of the loneliness that precedes death, as shown by Jack and Babette, is truly touching. Without a doubt, this is one of the best American novels of the 1980s.

Perhaps, it is necessary to start with the problems to which this novel, which is sometimes satirical, sometimes claims to be philosophical but is not, is dedicated.

Consumerism and the society of total consumption are ridiculed. People buy sprouted grains for years in the name of "caring for health", but do not eat them and then throw them away because they have spoiled. Advertising, which gives excessive importance to television and the media in the formation of opinions and worldviews, makes people stop believing their own eyes and believe the weather forecast on the radio. The pettiness of scientific interests and the pseudoscientific approach are also criticized. For example, a scientist studying Hitler does not know the German language and studies all kinds of rubbish instead of really important questions.

The unpreparedness for natural disasters despite the existence of teachings, although strange ones, is also mentioned. People's belief in "miracle pills" and the empty nonsense in conversations are also ridiculed. The author is interested in the psychology of the crowd - comparing the excited crowds around Elvis and Hitler. DeLillo believes that people gathered then in the name of death. I would like to note that herd behavior is generally inherent in animals experiencing fear, and it is precisely the fear of death that makes them gather in a herd. However, although humans are subject to the instinct of herd behavior, they are now driven not only by the fear of death but also, for example, by the need for information exchange (we are all here precisely for this reason).

In general, this theme is developed superficially and this thesis is controversial, at least in relation to Elvis. He correctly notes that people like to watch catastrophes, fires, both on television and in real life, and it is true that the fear of death is related here, but again in the novel, all this is only touched upon briefly.

Yes, all these themes are remarkably noticed, but the novel leaves the impression of the same pettiness that DeLillo ridicules.

This pettiness stems from the "cinematic" construction. There is a stylistic logic in this, but there is also a drawback in the form of being subordinate to the speed of event display in the cinema and a rather superficial interpretation of ideas.

From the point of view of conveying the emotions and psychological state of the characters, there is also no depth here - the characters claim that they are afraid of death, and we are asked to believe it. Where this fear comes from and what triggers it - we do not know. Further, the author develops the plot into something strange (but terribly cinematic). Marri puts forward the theory that killers kill to overcome death. And Jack sets out to kill Minka (he is also Gray), and in the killing, causing suffering is important to him. He shoots at the stomach (a vivid, frame-by-frame description of this moment with all the sound and visual effects), puts the pistol in Minka's hand and... gets a bullet in the wrist. After a minute of being stunned, normal perception returns to him, and for the first time he sees the personality of this person, experiences compassion, remorse, and takes him to a medical institution for help. This is a false idea and a false narrative from the perspective of formal logic. People do not behave like this. Nothing happened to the would-be killer himself for this. Further, there is also a rather absurd conversation with the nuns who do not believe in God. Why then this carnival? The scene with the child on the tricycle on the highway is intended to show that children do not know the fear of death. But this scene is clearly unnecessary. The novel ends in a supermarket, as if a new arrangement of goods on the shelves has brought universal confusion.

In general, in this novel, everything is somehow in a state of an average score - 2.5 points, rounded up to 3. The title "White Noise" looks effective in the context of the fear of death being discussed, is related to television, and presents the concept of death as the absence of a signal. This idea is dedicated to a very short phrase in the novel: "death is a sound, white noise". It seems deep, but this thought is stillborn because of its superficiality in the external resemblance of death to a picture on a television with characteristic "snow" and white noise, but death is not the absence of a signal that can be restored or requires tuning. And in general, this is not the end of the television. Death can come suddenly, like a break in the signal, or it can come slowly, gradually wearing down a person. In general, it is effective, but not accurate.

“Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom,” says Psalm 90. This is a truly existential theme for me, as like many people, I too belong to the group that prefers to suppress the finiteness of our own being. Therefore, the book by Don DeLillo really interested me thematically, especially since the pictogram on the great cover already hints at the ear protectors in front of the theme of death.

However, with my second DeLillo novel, I also couldn't do much with the style of satirical digressions and sometimes never-ending, absurd dialogues. The patchwork family of the Hitler studies professor at a fictional university in the US does not act wisely in the sense of the psalm at all. At first, everyone tries to suppress death and surrenders to the new gods of American culture in the 1980s: In supermarket temples, consumption is widely worshiped and at home, they eat heartily and discuss in large groups. The numerous stepchildren of the professor are really annoying and know-it-alls. I really didn't find the interfamily conversations very funny, often even really annoying. The book becomes more interesting when suddenly a chemical accident at the nearby railway yard jolts the whole city out of its lethargy. At first, in the house of our protagonist, they still want to eat cosily while the sirens wail, but then the evacuation also affects them. In the third part of the book, the fears of death then clearly come to the surface, especially in the wife, who surrenders to a dubious company that promises a medicinal cure for the fear of death. In the end, it becomes quite turbulent, with a breach of trust and murder.

I found the idea and the structure of the book basically successful. However, from a satirical point of view, the story didn't amuse me much and from a development-oriented point of view, it didn't enrich me much. Then it's better to read "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" mentioned by the protagonist at the end of the book by Tolstoy again. You get more out of that.

The world is indeed full of abandoned meanings.

White Noise is set in a realm that is just a small step away from a recognizable reality, or as DeLillo describes it, “just outside the range of human apprehension.” At first glance, none of its characters or events seem entirely credible. The characters are overly eloquent, and the scenes appear too stage-managed. For instance, why would people choose to walk out in the open to escape a toxic cloud instead of getting in their cars or staying barricaded in their homes? DeLillo does this to give us an image of a nomadic biblical exodus because he wants to strip humanity down to its basics in this novel – the fear of death and the subsequent gullibility that leads us to submit to all kinds of generalized information that we believe will keep us safe. He wants to show how information is used to herd us into a mentality of following the crowd. The Hitler warning constantly lurks in the outer corridors of the novel, with the idea of “Put on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger, safer.”

On the surface, White Noise is DeLillo’s most orthodox novel. It has a first-person narrative, a straightforward chronology, a mainly domestic setting, and lots of humor. The novel’s white noise represents the endless stream of (mis)information that we are bombarded with in our lives. Data plays a viral role in this novel, but it rarely translates into wisdom. The narrator Jack Gladney’s oldest son articulates this theme brilliantly when he asks questions like: “What can we do to make life easier for the Stone Agers? Can we make a refrigerator? Can we even explain how it works? What is electricity? What is light?” We may think we are so great and modern with our moon landings and artificial hearts, but if we were hurled back in time, could we really explain the simplest of things?

Children, who are still unburdened by the fear of death, are better (and more mysterious) filters of information in the novel than the fear-stricken adults. The adults are blinded and deafened by the wall of white noise from ubiquitous multimedia information because “the deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become.” The children often have to resist what their parents consider wisdom, as “the family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.”

As Gladney becomes more intimate with the approach of his own death, he finally begins to glean wisdom from information. “The air was rich with extrasensory material. Nearer to death, nearer to second sight. I continued to advance in consciousness. Things glowed, a secret life rising out of them.”

White Noise, while not quite the masterpiece that Underworld is, is still a brilliant achievement and DeLillo’s second-best novel.

So, I finally got around to reading this book. And I have to say, I really enjoyed it.

As I was reading, I couldn't help but compare it to a new family TV series called 'Schitt's Creek' starring Eugene Levy. It's one of the most entertaining and funny shows I've seen in years.

The dialogue in both 'White Noise' and 'Schitt's Creek' between the parents and kids is hilarious. In 'White Noise', Jack Gladney's friend, Murray, really cracked me up. He reminded me of one of the characters on 'Schitt's Creek'.

Most of this book seemed comical to me. From the very beginning, I was shaking my head in disbelief. "What? REALLY? Jack has been married 4 times?" I thought. "What woman in their right mind would marry a man who has been married 3 times before her?" And Jack's wife, Babette, had to be a little crazy to marry him. Reading for the blind was a perfect job for her since she could relate to blindness first hand.

It was also funny that Jack worried about not being able to speak German even though he created a special program at the college where he teaches on Hitler studies.

There were funny lines on page after page. I found myself laughing out loud quite often. But I couldn't help but wonder if I was reading the book right. Was it okay to laugh as much as I did? I mean, I know there seemed to be so much fear of death in the book, but somehow I found it more comical than serious.

I thought it was an easy and fun read, a kind of mild satire on various themes like the fear of death, digital frontier justice, capitalism, and consumerism. I also loved the wise-ass and savvy hip kids in the story. It was all preposterous fun!

But I have to wonder, for the DeLillo professionals out there, did I read it wrong?

The largest receptacle of light explosions and deadly phrases, time-stopper, from snake charmer and lost-in-the-void gazes.

It also makes you laugh.

Epic.

[97/100]

Minimum Phrasebook/

For over two months I have been sitting in this room watching TV until the early hours, listening carefully, taking notes. Great experience, which is humbling, if I may say so. Close to the mystical.
It was the season of the year and the time of day suitable for a certain persistent sadness to seep into the fabric of things. Penumbra, silence, iron frost. A certain sense of solitude in the bones.
I always lie to the doctors.
He carried with him a sense of Protestant slovenliness, an aura of collapse within which his body struggled to survive.
We received phone calls from Liechtenstein, from the Hebrides. Novel-like places, narrative plots.
A stewardess, stuck to the partition due to the acute angle of fall, was looking in the "Air Disaster Manual" for the appropriate passage for the circumstances.
It's not that she doesn't love life: it's being alone that scares her. The void, the sense of cosmic darkness. MasterCard, Visa, American Express.
The point in question was exactly the atmosphere, although at first I didn't know it.
It doesn't exactly mean that something is about to happen to her, at least not today or tomorrow. It only means that she is the sum total of her data. There is no escape.
- You're smart. Everyone says so. - What else could they say? I deal with neurochemistry. No one knows what it is.
I was trying to distinguish the walls, the chest of drawers in the corner. The old feeling of being defenseless. Small, weak, mortal, alone. Panic, divinity of the woods and wild places, half-goat.
The edge of the earth trembled in a dark fog. Above it rose the sun, which sank like a ship in a sea of fire. Another postmodern sunset, rich in romantic expressiveness. Why try to describe it?
She remained there, kneeling. All that was left to her was the ability to stay with her mouth open. She seemed engaged in imitating a person who stays with their mouth open.
Ruin is already included in creation, I explained, which demonstrated the existence of a certain nostalgia behind the principle of power, or a tendency to pre-program the melancholy of future generations.
- Who is your doctor? - Chakravarty, - I replied. - Is he good? - How do I know?

I’m glad I’m not a writer, because if I were one, after reading White Noise, I would immediately give up and throw away my typewriter without any hesitation. This novel is truly stunning.

I know that it has received a significant amount of praise and critical attention since its publication in 1985, and it is often included in the school curricula of anglophone countries. So, I’m not going to attempt to explore all the important themes that this book contemplates.

It’s just magnificent. You know that “POP” sensation you experience in your brain whenever you’re reading a book and come across a particularly witty and profound passage, perhaps a few times in every chapter? White Noise generates an average of 6 or 7 of those “POPs” on every page. It was one of the most mentally stimulating experiences I had this year.

I wish there was a way to measure brain power. For example, how many light bulbs can your brain turn on in a second if you concentrate really hard. Because that measure would be off the charts with DeLillo. This book itself would have that figure written on its cover: “Brain Power: 36 per sec.”, to set it apart from YA books, which would likely score around 2 or 3 BP per sec. And that’s okay. I’m not criticizing YA. I’m just saying that the brain energy required to write a complete series of those books might be just enough to power half a sentence of DeLillo’s White Noise. (Nah, I’m actually dissing YA. It’s crap).

This doesn’t mean it’s a “difficult” book. It just means that it fully deserves – I would say it requires – to be read a little slower than your average book.

For me, almost every paragraph and almost every sentence has been an experience. An actual, memorable experience, like seeing a breathtaking painting in a museum for the first time. How can you just rush through and move on? You have to give it the appropriate time. And more often than not, it’s to respect the sense of awe and beauty that each sentence evokes, rather than the need to think deeply about its meaning.

And it’s also very funny. Especially the first half, in my opinion, is written with an incredible sense of comedy and humor.

On a personal note, it took me back to my Italian high school years, when the type of hyper-witty irony used by DeLillo essentially defined my entire existence. So, in a sense, I feel like through White Noise, I almost rediscovered myself, and this is why it has skyrocketed straight to my top-10-ever list.

As an aside, here is a remarkable piece of trivia: DeLillo’s original title for “White Noise” (1985) was “Panasonic,” but you have to dig into his correspondence from 1984 to discover how disappointed DeLillo was when the Japanese electronics manufacturer that owns Panasonic declined his request to use the name.

“‘Panasonic’ as a title is crucial for several reasons,” DeLillo wrote to his then-editor, Elisabeth Sifton. He continued, “The novel is filled with the sounds of people’s voices, with sirens, loudspeakers, bullhorns, kitchen appliances, with radio and TV transmissions, with references to beams, rays, sound waves, etc. Jack, listening to people talk on the telephone and reflecting on his own death, thinks ‘all sounds, all souls.’ Again, the idea of pan-sonus connected to a fear of death. There is still another instance in which Greek roots are important. Jack associates the god Pan with his fear of death.”

Finally, I want to make another personal note, this time about the way in which DeLillo handles the central theme of death. It’s wonderful, and it’s so full of truth. However, DeLillo wrote the book while suffering from a kind of pessimistic nihilism that doesn’t allow for any glimmer of hope. In short, his worldview was (I don’t know if it still is) rather dark: God doesn’t exist, religion is a stupid delusion, even religious people (the nuns in the novel) are pretending to believe, everything is crappy because we are aware of our mortality and people can only pretend that’s not the case.

As a Catholic, I don’t share this Weltanschauung at all. So, I always find it a bit of a letdown when I discover extremely deep and intelligent authors who haven’t been able to resolve their existential issues with something hopeful – not necessarily Christianity, but a positive outlook on human existence. This is why it is such a different kind of pleasure reading Dante or Manzoni or Chesterton: those extremely rare examples of very deep AND very positive authors. I fully understand that this is a very personal thing.

Now I’m on to finishing Purity, by Jonathan Franzen, which is a very different flavor, and yet such a wonderful book as well. But I feel like I should go and get myself a copy of Underworld tomorrow and read that one first.

What to read next, what to keep as to be read, and what to never read. These are the real tragedies of life.

I had a stronger preference for Underworld. However, I believe that White Noise might have been a more significant (and indeed, perhaps a more influential) book. It is more of an advanced and exemplary piece of work.

His literary prophecy appears to be more genuine, more darkly apocalyptic, and more resonant in the present day than perhaps even DeLillo could have envisioned back in the mid-1980s. David Foster Wallace might be regarded as the voice of the 21st Century, but I would contend that DeLillo provided the plot for the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st.

DeLillo's works have had a profound impact on the literary landscape, and both "Underworld" and "White Noise" are testaments to his remarkable talent and vision. Each book offers unique insights into the human condition and the complex world we live in.

While "Underworld" may have appealed to me on a more personal level, "White Noise" stands as a powerful and influential work that continues to shape our understanding of contemporary society.