Name: White noise
ISBN: 0140274987

Don DeLillo

text and criticism

White noise

Edward Steel

Ashlyn

"How do I get around [this crippling fear of death]?" I said.

"You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature."

The Gladney's family life is disrupted and threatened when an industrial accident sends a lethal cloud over their community. Jack Gladney struggles with the ensuing complications which include murder.

White Noise

i normally read the book before watching the film this time i did it the other way around and i am shocked how alike the book is to the film. I really enjoyed.

Chloé

Funny, still very relevant, got a little tedious

Jess Rez

Every time Jack and Babette were in the supermarket I couldn’t help but picture Millburn Trader Joe’s which I think really encapsulates the real criticism of American consumerism 

jaya kohol

Patrick Book

Wait… modernity bad??!?🤯🤯🤯 Fear of death is an inexorable part of life?!??!🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

Miles Silverstein

Wait… modernity bad??!?🤯🤯🤯 Fear of death is an inexorable part of life?!??!🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

First of many read with Emma:)

there is no running away from identity that is set on you

Syasya Diyana 

'America's greatest living writer.' - Observer Jack Gladney is the creator and chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. This is the story of his absurd life; a life that is going well enough, until a chemical spill from a rail car releases an 'Airborne Toxic Event' and Jack is forced to confront his biggest fear - his own mortality. White Noise is an effortless combination of social satire and metaphysical dilemma in which Don DeLillo exposes our rampant consumerism, media saturation and novelty intellectualism. It captures the particular strangeness of life lived when the fear of death cannot be denied, repressed or obscured and ponders the role of the family in a time when the very meaning of our existence is under threat.

Didn't like it at first and then it clicked. Just stunning.

Leo Valentine

Jack Gladney, a professor of Nazi history at a Middle American liberal arts school, and his family try to handle normal family life as a black cloud of lethal gaseous fumes threatens their town. Reprint.

Colton Ray

This is one of those novels that's filled with great quotes, but I ultimately found it to be both a chore and a bore. I give it two stars because I feel like there is something there to get; I just didn't get it. Perhaps I'll return to it in the coming years.

Read for class. Super weird. Made me laugh. 

liya n

I only really heard about Don DeLillo because he's mentioned in a Bright Eyes song, and then the recent adaptation of this novel, so it felt like one I should read.  

The writing is exemplary and reminds me a lot of Pynchon in that sentences and paragraphs feel more important than the whole. I felt a little lost in the first third, and enjoyed the final parts much more, but will most likely re-read at some point. It's obviously not plot-driven; however, with so many characters it does often feel aimless - and I suppose that's the point in a novel of ideas.  

It also falls into that category of artefacts from the 80s and 90s that feel both ironic and prophetic considering their preoccupations. It's about rich, safe, comfortable characters and their ennui and confusion at living in a world that feels devoid of jeopardy. It all gives me a vibe of Calvin & Hobbes, early Simpsons and Larry David. One moment that's especially charming in retrospect is Jack worrying that his wife uses the landline to call people instead of writing letters, which now would seem quaint itself in a world of social media, not to mention global pandemics and terrorist attacks. 

So many points and characters feel underdeveloped and don't go anywhere, which is again the point with a satirical, absurdist, postmodern novel like this. I thought the 'air-born toxic event' would feature more heavily, but it's just one mildly threatening, confusing event among many, like the affair, Hitler studies and snake charmers. 

It's no disappointment since the writing is so humorous and well-crafted. The second-to-last chapter is one of the best I've ever read. 

Luke Pearce

I only really heard about Don DeLillo because he's mentioned in a Bright Eyes song, and then the recent adaptation of this novel, so it felt like one I should read.  

The writing is exemplary and reminds me a lot of Pynchon in that sentences and paragraphs feel more important than the whole. I felt a little lost in the first third, and enjoyed the final parts much more, but will most likely re-read at some point. It's obviously not plot-driven; however, with so many characters it does often feel aimless - and I suppose that's the point in a novel of ideas.  

It also falls into that category of artefacts from the 80s and 90s that feel both ironic and prophetic considering their preoccupations. It's about rich, safe, comfortable characters and their ennui and confusion at living in a world that feels devoid of jeopardy. It all gives me a vibe of Calvin & Hobbes, early Simpsons and Larry David. One moment that's especially charming in retrospect is Jack worrying that his wife uses the landline to call people instead of writing letters, which now would seem quaint itself in a world of social media, not to mention global pandemics and terrorist attacks. 

So many points and characters feel underdeveloped and don't go anywhere, which is again the point with a satirical, absurdist, postmodern novel like this. I thought the 'air-born toxic event' would feature more heavily, but it's just one mildly threatening, confusing event among many, like the affair, Hitler studies and snake charmers. 

It's no disappointment since the writing is so humorous and well-crafted. The second-to-last chapter is one of the best I've ever read. 



Ayla Hawthorne

I kept having the thought that this vaguely reminded me of Murakami. I think I understand postmodernism a bit better now 😂

Cody Degen

Jaden Nelson

a narrative representation of both the cliche and more obscure/less discussed anxieties, daily habits, downfalls, and dynamics of people and families within the scene of American consumerism. There were many relatable and insightful moments that I enjoyed laughing at or pondering, but it felt pretty long and lacking in some charm factor that would push it to be a favorite of mine. I didn’t get incredibly attached to the characters, and the ironic/satiric lens and dialogue of the whole book don’t make for the most exciting or touching read. I will say I did like how events in the book like airborne toxic event do model a sort of rapture from the lull of everyday life. It is a wake up call from the safety of routines that shocks the citizens into breaking from their sleepy minded routines and facing the concept of their death/the fragility of life and a sense of unity among neighbors who were previously unfamiliar or divided in belief. I have some of my highlights visible that show some decent sections of writing although a good chunk of this I read on audiobook so the notes there aren’t easy to migrate. Pretty good, i don’t know if I’d recommend it to most people to read. end

Grace M

I’m not sure I’ll ever find the right words to describe this book. I’ve never read anything like this before; there is no one who structures a sentence quite like DeLillo. As intelligent and poignant as it was bizarre and sad. A meditation on fear and death and family and consumerism. A book that is definitely not for everyone but is so rewarding to those who try.

Josh Dawson

Gavin

The drug could be dangerous, after all. I was not a believer in easy solutions, something to swallow that would rid my soul of an ancient fear. But I could not help thinking about that saucer-shaped tablet...

Tumbling from the back of my tongue down to my stomach. The drug core dissolving, releasing benevolent chemicals into my bloodstream, flooding the fear-of-death part of my brain. The pill itself silently self-destructing in a tiny inward burst, a polymer implosion, discreet and precise and considerate. Technology with a human face.


Exhausting - but funny! - postmodern critique of postmodernism. Maybe David Foster Wallace did it better but this is still a thrill

Jeff James

This is a great book, but it took me three tries over five years to finally read it all the way through. It's immensely quotable, fascinatingly post-modern and bordering on surreal because it is so heightened and odd. I would highly recommend it, and I'd love to see it as a movie some day. I imagine that most other people who pick it up for fun are more likely to actually read it all the way through on the first go...

White Noise is a pretty solid satire on academia, consumerism, and disaster fixation. As such, it's kind of unfair to compare character development and plot arcs to those in richer literary works. Characters in WN tend to use the same speech patterns and language across the board, so it seems like the characters only exist in reference to each other for the purposes of the dialogue instead of the other way around. It totally works for this type of book, though.

This was my first DeLillo and I wasn't disappointed. Underworld, here I come! 

White Noise is a pretty solid satire on academia, consumerism, and disaster fixation. As such, it's kind of unfair to compare character development and plot arcs to those in richer literary works. Characters in WN tend to use the same speech patterns and language across the board, so it seems like the characters only exist in reference to each other for the purposes of the dialogue instead of the other way around. It totally works for this type of book, though.

This was my first DeLillo and I wasn't disappointed. Underworld, here I come! 

Jack Gladney is the creator and chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. This is the story of his absurd life; a life that is going well enough, until a chemical spill from a rail car releases an 'Airborne Toxic Event' and Jack is forced to confront his biggest fear – his own mortality. White Noise is an effortless combination of social satire and metaphysical dilemma in which DeLillo exposes our rampant consumerism, media saturation and novelty intellectualism. It captures the particular strangeness of life lived when the fear of death cannot be denied, repressed or obscured and ponders the role of the family in a time when the very meaning of our existence is under threat.Celebrating 40 years of outstanding international writing, this is one of the essential Picador novels reissued in a beautiful new series style.

Trever

4.5 rounded up. Kind of a love-it-or-hate-it book, and I fall in the former camp. Having read The Broom of the System before this, it's easy to see that DFW was influenced by DeLillo.

Donald

What a frustrating book. It's Pynchon-lite. A novel composed for freshmen to read in their first college seminar. There are glimpses of good things (professor of Hitler studies who can't read German - hilarious!) but so much filler. All the characters give speeches all the time, and the moral/political/etc ideas in the speeches are not that interesting. It's overwritten.

I have a deep love for DeLillo's minor novel Point Omega, which I've read many times. It's a much better novel and full of more and better ideas, despite its brevity.

THAT SAID, it was awfully interesting to see just how much DFW borrowed from this for The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest. And not just Wallace. When I interviewed Joshua Cohen a few years ago, it was clear how seriously he took DeLillo, how much he liked him.

Guess I'll have to read more.

myra

I don't have much to say, simply because I've done all the analysis, as this was a mandatory reading for class. This was...a special novel to say the least, but I didn't hate it so, that's that.

Bob Simone

I didn't get it. I get that death is scary and that much of our lives are oriented around mitigating that, but his portrayal didn't touch me any deeper than the sentence I just wrote. Maybe cause it's 25yo. It didn't feel dated, though. But maybe the issues were dated. Actually, I'm not sure what the issues were. Maybe their terror is fully a part of my baseline since I grew up after they started shambling.

I loved the family exchanges where each character claimed to know things that they know only half truths (at best) about. To me, that was the most sickening part. That, and everything that got within 3 feet of Heinrich. Sickening in a good way though, I would have liked for the rest of the book to have been equally resonant. Maybe I'm too young, or too well ego defended (thankfully) to really get the rest. Maybe that says something about my own psychology. If it does, I don't know what it is.

I would try another of his books in the future, if anyone's got any recs.

Sandra Bartos

DeLillo is Jackson Pollock of literature :)

Trevor Berrett

The writing is superb. Much of the dialogue was brilliant--comical and at the same time profound. So why did I only give it three stars? Honestly, in the end I never really cared about the book. It was a book I intended to read and I did it. I don't think I'll remember much of the content, only that I liked the presentation. That's not to say that the content was not compelling or that it was dull. I think I just felt like a lot of the time I was reading literary theory and not literary text.

White noise text and criticism