Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 320 pages
- Published by: Penguin Non-Classics June 1, 1999
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0140283307
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0140283303
-
Book Dimensions:
8.3 x 5.6 x 1 inches
- Weighs: 12.8 ounces
Product Review
Something is amiss in a small college town in Middle America. Something subliminal, something omnipresent, something hard to put your finger on. For example, teachers and students at the grade school are falling mysteriously ill:
Investigators said it could be the ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation, the electrical insulation, the cafeteria food, the rays emitted by microcomputers, the asbestos fireproofing, the adhesive on shipping containers, the fumes from the chlorinated pool, or perhaps something deeper, finer-grained, more closely woven into the fabric of things.
J.A.K. Gladney, world-renowned as the living center, the absolute font, of Hitler Studies in North America in the mid-1980s, describes the malaise affecting his town in a superbly ironic and detached manner. But even he fails to mask his disquiet. There is menace in the air, and ultimately it is made manifest: a poisonous cloud--an "airborne toxic event"--unleashed by an industrial accident floats over the town, requiring evacuation. In the aftermath, as the residents adjust to new and blazingly brilliant sunsets, Gladney and his family must confront their own poses, night terrors, self-deceptions, and secrets.
DeLillo is at his dark, hilarious best in this 1985 National Book Award winner, a novel that preceded but anticipated the explosion of the Internet, tabloid television, and the dialed-in, wired-up, endlessly accelerated tenor of the culture we live in. He doesn't just describe life in a hypermediated society, he re-creates it. His characters repeat phrases, information, and rumor gleaned from television, radio, and other media sources like people speaking in code. And DeLillo has seeded the book with short gemlike episodes that demand to be read aloud, and that haunt the imagination years after their first reading: a visit to the Most Photographed Barn in America. A plane that nearly falls out of the sky. An hour in a classroom, canonizing Elvis. These vignettes are vivid and unique, yet, like the phrases from television shows that interject themselves, out of context, into Gladney's consciousness, they are strangely unconnected to one another--reflections of the lives DeLillo is showing us we lead.
--Jan Bultmann
From Publishers Weekly
Chairman of the department of Hitler studies at a Midwestern college, Jack Gladney is accidently exposed to a cloud of noxious chemicals, part of a world of the future that is doomed because of misused technology, artifical products and foods, and overpopulation. PW appreciated DeLillo's "bleak, ironic" vision, calling it "not so much a tragic view of history as a macabre one." January
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: White Noise (Contemporary American Fiction) (Paperback)
What a stubborn, perplexing book. If I had any kind of life, I might resent the time this novel extracted from it to afflict me with its arch, dark-gray worldview. I know, I know. Being that I didn't go to an Ivy League college, don't visit the Guggenheim for relaxation, or work out while listening to atonal music, I probably had little chance making any headway here. Don DeLillo is just out of my league. I'm like an ant trying to learn brain surgery reading this book. So here's what happens, as best I can figure. A college professor named Gladney who chairs a department on Hitler studies in a nameless college finds he has contracted a strange contamination and finds himself unable to face the prospect of his death. He is befriended by a visiting professor who wants to form his own academic discipline around Elvis. Meanwhile, his wife takes these strange pills, and assorted children run about, having hyperliterate conversations about nucleotides and the perils of sugarless gum. The point of the novel, as best I can figure, is that we are all surrounded by waves and waves of meaningless sounds, images, and information designed to prop us up through our brief sojourns along this mortal highway. "We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information," one of Gladney's colleagues says, before they get one courtesy of an "airborne toxic event" that afflicts Gladney with his sad condition. Sad, except you never buy any of these people as real. Instead, they seem two-dimensional philosophic constructs designed to trot out some of DeLillo's often fascinating but always depressing ideas about the nature of man in a Godless universe. I couldn't get close to any of these people, not that I didn't try. There are those like the New York Times reviewer who describe "White Noise" as comic, and there are some archly amusing lines. One professor congratulates Gladney thusly: "Nobody on the faculty of any college or university in this part of the country can so much as utter the word Hitler without a nod in your direction, literally or metaphorically...He is now your Hitler, Gladney's Hitler. It must be deeply satisfying for you." That's irony, in case you didn't guess, even more pronounced because the speaker's Jewish. "White Noise" is certainly surreal. When a plane is about to crash, the voice on the address system informs the passengers: "We're a silver gleaming death machine." People fleeing the deadly cloud complain about the lack of media coverage. A friend of one of the children plans to insert himself in a glass cage with deadly mambas for seventy hours, to break the world record. There are moments of amusement, more dry chuckles than anything else. Certainly not engagement. I've read a couple of other DeLillo novels and liked them. "Underworld" was also surreal, but I cared more about the characters and the situations they found themselves in. "Libra" is a solid examination of the Kennedy assassination, a tour de force of imaginative historical reconstruction. But I found "White Noise" a mess. If you find otherwise, congratulations. Just don't say I didn't warn you.
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