WHITE NOISE (BY) DON DELILLO

Published 1985, 326 pages
Characters: D 
Writing: C+
Plot / Pacing:  B
Poignancy: B+

White Noise is, in a sense, more about its writing style than its content. In this post-modern tale of a professor who teaches "Hitler Studies" and a mysterious "airborne toxic event" that threatens a small town, Don DeLillo's writing flutters along with airy characters and decontextualized situations; everything is in snippets, in abstractions, fighting to remove any overall coherency in the effort to create, well, white noise. White Noise is, and is about, the constant bombardment of trivial sounds and soundbites that make up the modern flow of information, our very mode of communication. It's also about the fear of death, how the reduction of everything to little bits of information turns even this basic, human emotion into an incomprehensible, unavoidable buzz in the air. By far DeLillo's best trick is the random insertions of dialogue from a nearby TVor radio — completely out of context one-liners delivered from an advertisement or newscaster that have no relation to anything, no introduction, no commentary. It's as if you're hearing them in the background while the rest of the scene unfolds, a clever post-modern method of conveying the problems with our post-modern society.

Unfortunately this same mood pervades the whole text, and with much reduced effectiveness. Apocalyptic catastrophe occurs with little fanfare or emotion, a subplot enduring only through the book's mid-section. The calamity is simply another event, given the same detail and urgency as mundane domestic turmoil, career-troubles, school-troubles, absurdest health concerns. Everything, here, is on the same level of urgency — the level of a newscaster droning away on television. As a concept, it's almost brilliant, giving DeLillo the opportunity to drop devastating commentary on society, to playfully skewer both our worries and solutions through deadpan, built-in satire — and it's as satire that this book excels.  Yet somewhere along the line, post-modernists seemed to decide that they could forgo endearing characters and a readable story, just as long as their satire made its point.  But a satirical novel is still a novel, after all, and no book is excused for ignoring its foremost assets — its characters. In White Noise, everything is post-modern, lightweight and inconsequential. White Noise might have been better as an experimental personal essay, because at least then DeLillo wouldn't have had to pretend to give his creations some semblance of life.

Down to the dialogue, our protagonist and his family are maddeningly consistent to the rest of DeLillo's post-modern monotony — the exact tone, shade, texture, color and pattern of the novel, fitting in so seamlessly that, like the popular image of Zach Braff wearing his wallpaper-inspired shirt in Garden State, you almost don't notice them. It's admittedly not an oversight of the author, but exactly his intention.  This is his point, but it doesn't make it any more bearable.  By the time the book is over, the only character whose name I could recall was the wife, Babette, and only then because the main character keeps referring to her in the third person for no apparent reason, making her memorable not through characterization but through brute-force annoyance.  It doesn't help that White Noise is about as subtle as the mindless marketing that it's advertising, and just as clumsily written.  These characters deal with all their fears through relentless existential conversations, conversations that naturally never accomplish anything. It's understood that the dialogue is meant to be unrealistic — yes, I understand this, it was poorly written on purpose — and it accomplishes this perfectly.  See for yourself:

"I'm going running," she said.

"Is that a good idea? At night?"

"What is night? It happens seven times a week. Where is the uniqueness in this?"

"It's dark. It's wet."

"Do we live in a blinding desert glare? What is wet? We live with wet."

Everyone talks like this, even the couple's young children.  Maybe you're okay with the style.  Maybe you think it's genuinely witty instead of too-witty-for-its-own-good.  For me, the sentences above are like a drill to the brain, turning the novel into a shrill, clumsy, excruciating mess.  As the novel is not plot-driven and not particularly descriptive, there is obviously a great deal of dialogue, most of it unbearable. It's not only tedious but frustrating, as existentialism often is when it falls flat. 

Still, it would be unfair to bring the whole of the novel down to that level for the sake of a review. It wouldn't be accurate; there are a few truly memorable passages here, but they are few and far between. For the ideas, I thoroughly enjoyed this book — DeLillo really was on the right track, and White Noise certainly approaches brilliance more than once — but it was unnecessary and unclever for DeLillo to make his prose such a chore to get through.