Library copy from the university I work at now. I'd read DeLillo's Point Omega and The Body Artist for my Literature degree years ago, and liked them both, but especially The Body Artist. Both of these books are novellas really, and it took me a long time to finally break in to any of DeLillo's chunkier texts, even when the premises really caught me.
I fell into a reading rhythm with White Noise as a text of episodes; of anecdote's and events that begin and end in chapters and that shuffle a main story along. These 'episodes' each feel like they're wrapping up an exaggerated occurrence or description of, for want of a better word, postmodern America. Ridiculous but believable events over and over. Straight from the off, with the convoy of gleaming station wagons of parents dropping their children off to university, like a herd or natural events not to be missed, described with hilarity and aptness; a favourite description is of the fathers as having "something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage."
The core of the book is a search for an avoidance or meaning in the fear of death, that I felt was such a burden for Jack Gladney and his partner Babette because in this era of American suburbiana, so much else has been taken care of or rendered obsolete that there are not other things to worry about. There is no feeling of impoverishment in their lives, despite their positions as multi-divorcees. The big catastrophic event in the second section is mostly void of worry about impending death, even though it could potentially be a cause; it almost happily fills the void Jack & Babette usually have empty for fear of death.
Despite this morbid preoccupation of the main characters, it's hard to mirror their philosophical dread as the world of the book is sodden, overloaded, infested, with stimuli. Radios and televisions are always on, overheard. Adverts and packaging instructions bleed into the text. Artificial habitats and occasions spawned from a docile consumer culture manifest into hypnotising tableaus, fit for a cosmic bird watcher distracted by human life for a moment.
Streams of information and data gathering stitch the book together; products promise more, Jack and Murray as academics endlessly look for meaning out in it; in Jack's case in Hitler studies, a field he discovered, and Murray in cultural niches, such as a seminar he runs on car crashes. The safe zones of the 'Airborne Toxic Event' are run by SIMUVAC, Simulated Evacuation, seeking more data rather than looking at the event head on.
The world of White Noise, like our own, is a pastiche of headache-inducing stimuli, of searches for meaning and attempts at making it solid, of fear and confusion in a Western-bloc microcosm. I don't want to spoil anything, but readers of The Body Artist might enjoy one of DeLillo's spectres, the not-suggested supernatural presence, the figure who is the malady of the text in spirit, like a postmodern Dickensian ghost.
