"Were Americans this Dumb before Television?"

Note: 1985. Famine in Ethiopia. Live Aid. New Coke. A hideously cold winter in the Eastern US. Greenpeace ship sunk. Nintendo. The Color Purple. REM. Gorbymania. Michael Jordan. This novel. I missed all these things. I was in graduate school.

White Noise – Don DeLillo

In 1985 this example of postmodern literature won the National Book Award for Fiction. It is humorous and accessible yet terribly bizarre at the same time. DeLillo‘s central concerns are the fear of death and the fear of the fear of death, and the strategies people adopt to get out of the double-bind of feeling anxiety and then beating themselves up for feeling anxiety. These strategies include but are not limited to cultivating obsessions related to food, exercise, and the hedonistic pleasures of consuming.

The reader is drawn into the story because the characters and setting are so everyday. It’s set in a Midwestern town that’s also a college town, say Ithaca or La Crosse or Normal or Grand Forks. The main character is Jack Gladney.  As a university professor, he has made a niche for himself by founding a Center for Hitler Studies, though his directorship makes him vulnerable because he has only beginner’s proficiency in German. Credentials count for much in academe so his lack of language chops means his scholarly reputation is founded on sand.

Not that he is different from other members of the faculty, all of whom are like him, sufferers of impostor syndrome. Murray is a colleague who wants to replicate Jack’s Hitler Center with an Elvis Institute. He demonstrates a propensity to over-think everything, which causes his hold on reality to slip. Impressionable Jack has no defenses against being bamboozled by Murray. Murray calls Jack in the middle of the night to follow up on their conversation about Jack’s agoraphobic German teacher. Murray says, “He looks like a man who finds dead bodies erotic,” which disgusts Jack so much that he doesn’t see the tutor again.

Jack’s personal life has been anything but stable. He is on wife #5, Babette, and they live with their kids from their previous marriages. DeLillo captures their flow of conversations, sometimes abstract, sometimes trivial. Their exchanges are realistic in their mix of significance and insignificance. And the TV is always on, constantly stirring the air with fact and trivia and violence and silliness and pitches.

I get the impression that DeLillo wanted to convey how the flow of information is so incessant that we become hardened and desensitized to it. Even back in 1985, pre-computer-in-every-pocket, pre-web, pre-social media, we were unable to react effectively to or to exercise our sense, common or critical, on the data that captures or half-captures our attention. In this novel, town dwellers react to the uncertainty of an environmental disaster with a mute stoic incomprehension, kept in a refugee camp for nine days. And after the “toxic airborne event” they just get on with life.  

Jack imagines that his death will be graceful and elegant, like a white swan landing on a lake. But after he’s exposed to the “airborne toxic event,” extensive medical testing reveals to Jack that “death is in him” in the form of a toxin with an unpronounceable unmemorable name in his bloodstream. His original confidence about death transforms into constant anxiety that he tries to diminish with obsession.

Jack anxiously hopes for reassurance in miracle anti-anxiety drugs advertised in the tiny ads buried in weekly gossip tabloids (remember those?). He finds out his wife has been taking an experimental medication to counteract the fear of death and he fixates on the idea to take the pills too though she won’t tell him who sponsoring the trial and hints the medication has side effects that would “beach a whale.” His father-in-law Vern gifts him with a handgun which Jack notes is the “ultimate device for determining one’s competence in the world,” as neat a piece of male psychology as we’ll ever see in a novel.  And the gun looms large in the last part of the book.

I enjoyed reading White Noise. DeLillo isn’t interested in narrative development or characters that aren’t remote, but his use of language really is engrossing. Words breathe, in DeLillo’s view; for example, he renders bureaucrat attitude and expert double-talk hilariously. In this novel, he almost always avoids the gnomic dialogue that defeated me in Underworld (1997). With post-modern novels, different readers will get different take-aways, if indeed getting impressions to think about is a reader’s goal in reading.