Do you like cultural satire? Do you like absurdism? How about the 1980s? How about existential musings? Don’t mind it when there isn’t much of a plot? Yet dramatic things happen? If this is you, run don’t walk to read White Noise by Don DeLillo, if you haven’t already. I mean, it’s been around since 1985 when it won the National Book Award. But here I was, forty years later, reading it for a book club. And personally, I really liked it. I laughed, I fell for a couple of the characters, I thoroughly enjoyed some of the dialogue. And you might, too, though most of the peeps in my book club found it to be outdated and, well, took it a little too seriously.

Jack and Babette live in a small, private college town with their (very) blended family, where Jack is a (founding/expert) professor of Hitler Studies. With kids from their toddler years through teens, life is never dull, and it becomes even less so when there is an “airborne toxic event” within sight of their attic window. With visits from various other kids, exes and in-laws, and interactions with other (quirky and creepy) professors and townies, Jack and Babette slowly slide into considering their own deaths amidst all the consumerism and cultural numbing. Jack might actually be dying—the tests are a little unclear—and Babette has gotten herself into a mysterious and sketchy situation trying to avoid the fear of death. Together, they make quite a postmodern pair.

I might have given too much away, but I don’t think so. Because this book isn’t really about the plot, doesn’t have much of a plot to it. Really, there are a handful of subplots that drive us through, but they come and go and we don’t know what event or conclusion we’re waiting for most of the time. In fact, there is a sort of conclusion, but it’s not very traditional. And with a couple scenes tacked on after this conclusion—one of them so random I felt like maybe it was meant to keep us, on purpose, from having a normal denouement—we have left plot-land again by the end.

The point of this book is to think. The point is cultural satire, which means that laughing would also be appropriate. I don’t want to hype it up too much, but my husband kept catching me laughing at the book and saying, “That must be really funny,” or “You’re really enjoying that book.” To either one, I shrugged my shoulders. Because yes and yes, but also it wasn’t that funny (books almost never are) and I was enjoying some parts or aspects of the book, but not others. It wasn’t going to be my next favorite book, and yet I had to admit that I was enjoying it and that it was memorable. Maybe I was liking it despite myself, because in many ways it’s not my style. It’s my husband’s style. I mean, he loves Kurt Vonnegut. Maybe I can get him to read it.

At book club, someone described their reading of it like watching the literary version of a Wes Anderson movie. The characters are stilted (purposefully), almost posed, the dialogue more intentional than realistic, the scenes filled with object placement and saturated moments. But really 80s. (So like a Wes Anderson movie set in the 80s amidst chemical fears, the grocery store one of the more important settings.) It is considered absurdist, but I have definitely seen more absurd. Some readers were like “Those kids are not like real kids” and others were like “Sure they are, just precocious.” There is a flat affect in the story-telling voice (which is Jack’s POV) that belies the drama of many of the situations. And yeah, no one changes. Just, here: don’t expect a real plot, don’t expect characters to change. This is satire. It is fairly absurd. It is what it is.

I agree with other readers that this book can’t age well, but for different reasons than they tend to give. I don’t think it’s about it being set in the 80s or having a postmodern style or dealing with timely things; there are some real universals here. However, I think what hasn’t aged well is the context. It is difficult to know what DeLillo means when we are decades in the future, because we don’t read “Hitler” or “nuclear” or “Elvis” or anything and have exactly the same feelings and references and thoughts as his original readers. Some of it is probably still similar enough to work (like probably Hitler), but I was not always sure I was having the right response. A lot has changed in our culture and in the world since 1985. With his tongue in his cheek, DeLillo needs me to understand what he isn’t saying, he needs me to respond in a predictable way, viscerally. This cannot stay the same over time. It hasn’t and it won’t. Reading an article about this book (or like a SparkNotes) is probably the only way to fully appreciate it and its cultural references at this point (and into the future). But I think overall we can still appreciate it now if we read it with our minds open. (Then again, I bought a used copy that was more marked-up than advertised, and I was appalled—underwhelmed—by the “basic” nature of the comments and underlining. So maybe it is best read now by academic types or when studied in classrooms.) Not every idea presented is supposed to be read as true. Sometimes, quite the opposite. What we are definitely supposed to notice are the repeated phrases, like “the main point is…” and “the radio came on” and sudden, brief paragraphs that include three related products (Visa, Citibank, MasterCard—I made that up, but there is one like it in there), and also the themes (death, consumerism, media, technology, dialogue as opposed to reality, etc). You don’t have to go that deep to enjoy the book, but it is certainly meant to be read that way. Which is why the plot and structure is treated as secondary to other things.

The ending is a thing. Eventually a plot-like thing emerges, which is sorta like a few sub-plots, but overall it remains disjointed. Then one of the main plot-like things comes to a head. And then something else happens out of the blue, introducing crisis-level tension with a random situation. And then there’s a short, hopeful scene. Oh boy. Which one is even the end? Which thing is the climax? They are all related to the themes, I suppose, but do not expect a conventional ending. I am pretty sure that by now you are not, and will be surprised to find that there is some actual drama  (and violence) to tie up some of the loose ends.

So I liked reading this book. Several people in book club just rolled their eyes and sighed as a response. I found it funny and interesting and full of memorable characters and even a few I really liked (Heinrich, Deborah, and Winnie). I won’t soon forget it. I can see why it won the Book Award, but there are aspects of it that aren’t (and can’t) age well, since it’s satire.

Don DeLillo is famous but maybe not the most famous author. His work is clearly postmodern and deals with themes that we see in White Noise, like consumerism and the emptiness of American culture. His work is often funny, sometimes dark. I didn’t really recognize any of his other titles, but they are:

AmericanaEnd ZoneGreat Jones StreetRatner’s StarPlayersRunning DogThe NamesLibra (novelized Lee Harvey Oswald)Mao II (which won the PEN/Faulkner)UnderworldThe Body ArtistCosmopolisFalling ManGame Six (play)Point OmegaThe Angel Esmerelda (short story collection)Zero KThe Silence

(There is a very extensive bibliography of his work HERE.) He received both the Library of Congress Prize and the National Book Awards Medal for overall contributions to the book world. Many of his books have (modern and postmodern) historical settings/relevance (like the Cold War, the assassination of JFK, the Superbowl, 9/11, even the Pandemic), and all of them speak to something(s) in the culture. It is possible I’ll end up reading Mao II someday, but probably not others of his books. Yet they really intrigue me.

“Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful weight? There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding. They make me wary not of personal failure and defeat but of something more general, something large in scope and content” (p6).

“’Because she thinks if she keeps buying it, she’ll have to eat it just to get rid of it. It’s like she’s trying to trick herself’” (p7).

“Our senses are wrong much more often than they’re right. This has been proved in a laboratory. Don’t you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems? There’s no past, present, of future outside our own mind. The so-called laws of motion are a big hoax. Even sound can trick the mind. Just because you don’t hear a sound doesn’t men it’s not out there’” (p23).

“’Either I’m taking something and I don’t remember or I’m not taking something and I don’t remember’” (p53).

“It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone” (p56).

“People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it” (p65).

“Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is the strongest where objective reality is more likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say” (p82).

“Bee made us feel self-conscious at times, a punishment that visitors will unintentionally inflict on their complacent hosts” (p94).

“The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying” (p98).

“…we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die” (p99).

“There are no amateurs in the world of children” (p102).

“Is a symptom a sign or a thing?” (p123).

“It is surely possible to be awed by the thing that threatens your life…” (p124).

“If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystical light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially” (p141).

“’This is the nature of modern death,’ Murray said. ‘It has a life independent of us. It is growing in prestige and dimension. It has a sweep it never had before. We study it objectively. We can predict its appearance, trace its path in the body. We can take cross-section pictures of it, tape its tremors and waves’” (p144).

“In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing fringe groups. They’ve practiced staying alive” (p150).

“It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain” (p167).

“’Terrifying data is now an industry in itself. Different firms compete to see how badly they can scare us’” (p168).

“Panic, the god of woods and wilderness, half goat” (p213).

“…’but I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit’” (p217).

“’Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level’” (p218).

“Evidently fathers and sons seek fellowship at such events. Fires help draw them closer, provide a conversational wedge. There is equipment to appraise, the technique of firemen to discuss and criticize” (p228)

“’Routines can be deadly, Vern, carried to extremes’” (p237).

“’We don’t want guns in our little town.’ / ‘Be smart for once in your life,’ he told me in the dark car. ‘It’s not what you want that matters’” (p242).

“He did a drawing of a Reich structure that was to be built of special materials, allowing it to crumble romantically—a drawing of fallen walls, half columns furled in wisteria. The ruin is built into the creation, I said, which shows a certain nostalgia behind the power principle, or a tendency to organize the longings of future generations” (p246).

“’Are you crazy? Of course. That’s the elitist idea, would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?’ / ‘Well said.’ / ‘This is death. I don’t want it to tarry awhile so I can write a monograph. I want it to go away for seventy or eighty years’” (p271).

“We’re all aware there’s no escape from death. How do we deal with this crushing knowledge? We repress, we disguise, we bury, we exclude. Some people do it better than others, that’s all” (p275).

“We create beautiful and lasting things, build vast civilizations.’ / ‘Gorgeous evasions,’ he said. ‘Great escapes’” (p276).

“Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that’s not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control” (p278).

Image from IMDB.com

I liked White Noise (2022, with Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, and Adam Driver), but I feel like I have to justify this. My husband liked it too, but without having read the book he was less committed to his enjoyment of the movie. This new movie has pretty bad reviews from viewers, better with the critics, but I just don’t agree with the haters. Perhaps the movie is best seen when you have read the book? It is true to the book, I thought, both in content (with only a couple added things) and spirit. The thing you have to do when approaching the movie, whether or not you’ve read the book, is understand that it is absurdist satire. In the genre, I feel like it hit the nail on the head, could even be a cult classic. I had issue with some of the acting (though some of it was excellent). I was surprised that Murray had been changed so much (maybe to avoid the Jewish thing) though I was thrilled he wasn’t half as creepy. I was sad that Millie didn’t do her weird hiding thing, but maybe that works best in book form. Yeah, I liked it. And if you understand what it’s doing, things like the interpretive dancing-grocery store scenes in the end credits makes pitch-perfect sense. I will admit that it feels like a strange time to have made this movie, even though the Pandemic was with us still.