Reading White Noise

            My first Don DeLillo book is White Noise, which got him a National Book Award. It’s an album of popular culture and American materialism. Characters repeat the clichés used in newspaper and TV reports of murders, natural disasters, plane crashes, and other dire events. DeLillo inserts catalogues of product names in a parody of consumer culture that is as funny and also as grim as Heller’s parody of the idiocies of war and the army in Catch-22. The family whom we follow through the narration of Jack Gladney is a diorama of characters whose closest approach to any spiritual existence is their awe-struck spectating at sunsets caused by a chemical spill that evacuated their little Midwestern town and that may be slowly killing Jack.

            He runs a department at the local college devoted to Hitler studies, though he’s never learned German. His fifth wife (counting twice the one he divorced and later remarried), Babette, teaches a course in standing, sitting, and walking, and she also volunteers as a reader for a blind man; what she reads him are the tabloids from the local market checkout counter. Jack’s son Heinrich enjoys reminding his family and friends about all the disasters that can plague modern life. He also plays chess by mail with a condemned mass murderer in prison.

            In this world where all their physical needs are met and where they are pleased consumers, both Jack and Babette suffer from an overpowering fear of death. To allay it, Babette has been willing to sleep with the maker of a drug supposed to quiet that part of the brain where fear of death resides. Jack decides to find and kill this man—perhaps the killing itself will affirm Jack’s life and address his fear of death. He will also confiscate the man’s supply of his drug. Jack’s plan goes awry and he takes his victim to a hospital after they have injured each other. There, in a comic scene, they are nursed by a German nun who taunts Jack with his simpleminded conviction that she must be a believer because she is a nun.

            Jack and Babette’s life resumes. In the last chapter their youngest child, Wilder, miraculously rides his toy tricycle through many lanes of both directions of freeway traffic. This scene is not witnessed by Jack and, unlike the rest of the book, is not told from his viewpoint. The children, and especially Wilder, who never talks, are the only countervailing force to the numbing materialism of the book’s world. Jack and Babette like to have the children around, and Jack sometimes watches the younger ones sleeping for half an hour at a time. But no one ever articulates this idea of the sleeping or pre-vocal child being opposed to the usual aspect of their world, filled as it is with talk—media-driven, half-informed, pseudoscientific, academically pretentious, rife with advertising language.