White Noise

It's a literary report on the state of the modern obsessions, most of which I don't necessarily share, so getting to the end of DeLillo's "White Noise" was more of good reading manners than compulsion.

The praise on the cover casts the book as "extraordinarily funny" and "dizzying", but for the most part I found it neither uniquely amusing, nor particularly impressive. It seems to be composed around a tangled mess of the narrator's worries, which all have their roots in his irrational fear of death. Basically actionless, it traces the inner struggle of Jack Gladney, a Hitler studies academic, as he tries to accomodate and explain anxieties and tensions that steadily take hold of his daily life. Most decisions he takes in the book are propelled by conscious and unconscious fright, the premonitions of his own and his wife's death. Page after page we learn how musings about dying dominate his mind, some of which are plainly unreadable, pretentious, full of hot air and cheap philosophy, while others stike the reader as extremely apt. Or funny, for that matter, for example when Gladney comes down to the living room at night, drawn by odd sounds, imagining he's about to meet his death, while in fact it's just his father-in-law, who sneaked in unannounced, trying not to wake up the house.

Death may be in the limelight here, but there's a host of other phobias that make up the structure of the narration. The creeping technology, which defines people's lives and defies their understanding, rampant consumerism, with needless visits to the supermarket, one of the key destinations in the book. What else is there? Threatening medicine, with untested pills of unknown side effects that manage to assuage the fear of death, created in the wake of opaque experiments. Emergency situations, with the toxic cloud that plagues the college town of Blacksmith at the start of the book coming back over and over again in the guise of post-fallout medical checkups, disaster simulation teams running regular rehearsals, worrying levels of contamination and other threats in dozens. And finally, decadence that both featured academics ooze, being experts in the sombre disciplines of Hitler studies (Gladney) and car crushes (Murray).

Published in 1985, (a contemporary review here) it must have been inspired by the end of the century anxiety, but it now reads awkwardly, with obsessions and insecurities taking all the attention, until it gets banal or clearly over the top. But, to do justice to "White Noise", it neatly captures, also in its telling title, the randomness of the times, its chaotic, obsessed pace, overburdened with technology and commercialism.