Book12: "White Noise" by Don Delillo
Disclaimer: The following is a poorly written review with an absolute disregard for research, insight, professionalism, and just plain old good manners. Reading the review is likely to fill readers with the incessant need to bitch and moan like an juvenile snob. I take no responsibility for causing such actions, or any responsibilty for this review in general.
“White Noise” by Don Delillo came as another recommendation for a friend, but only came as that; no expectations of greatness or prestige other than the cover telling me it is one of Penguin Books’ great books of the 20th century. As stated, no research was done prior to reading. I jumped in head first.
The story centers on Jack Gladney, a professor at a Midwestern college who teaches and is the the department head of Hitler studies. Jack is around 50 years of age, has been divorced five times from four different women, and is currently married to Babette, a slightly overweight cheery middle aged house wife who has brought two of her own children from previous marriages to match Jack. Together the couple and their four children/step-children live in the outskirts of a town called Iron City. Jack has a preoccupation with death, and his strong fear of it becomes the focal point of his life after his town has a brush with a potentially lethal chemical cloud.
The book is divided into three “acts”, if you will: Waves and Radiation, The Airborne Toxic Event, and Dylarama. The first act is somewhat disjointed. The chapters arent told as a continuous narrative story, but instead separate events involving the characters, serving as a background of sorts for the characters, introducing who they are. The second act introduces what I consider the “start” of the story; the city is exposed to a black chemical cloud that infects those exposed with a chemical called Nyodene D. The final act, and the meatiest of them all, narrates the aftermath of the exposure, and how it affected the lives of Jack Gladney and his family.
To be honest, I was pretty lost for something like the first two hundred pages of the book. I, more or less, struggled through the first fifty pages of the book, and could not keep myself awake to read THREE pages without falling asleep (after working thirteen hour work days, six days out of the week). It probably had a lot to do with the fact the first part of the book, as I said, did not have a continuously flowing story, but was a series of episodes (in the form of chapters) providing background information on the characters. Call me a juvenile reader, but in order to get hooked to a literary story, I need a story I can immerse myself in; a plot I can attach myself to. Obviously, in the later parts and chapters, a story emerges and I’m able to finish the book, but even then, I am still not one hundred percent there. A couple main themes jumped out to me, but I don’t think I fully grasped those ideas, though I will try to put them into words.
The first of the themes that seemed to jump out was the oddity of the culture. Firstly, Jack is the department head for Hitler studies, which was created because Jack suggested it to the school’s dean. I understand that there might be classes dedicated solely to the study of Hitler, but an entire department? And from the book, it seemed like it wasn’t an outrageous or eccentric thing. The classes were well attended; as a professor, Jack was highly respected by the students and staff. They even hold a conference to be attended by Hitler scholars from around the world. It’s as if the Department of Hitler Studies is legitimized just because Professor Gladney proposed it, and that was more than enough for others around the world to give it credibility. The same thing can be seen in Jack’s colleague, Murray, who was formerly a sports writer from New York City, but came to the school to teach pop culture, particularly the studies of Elvis Presley. The Pop Culture Department had already been established, but Murray achieves respect for himself as a professor and for his subject with the help of Jack, who pops into one of Murray’s classes for a scholarly debate/discussion. And the students/faculty accept it! I realize it’s a fictional story therefore anything can basically happen, but it’s just shocking to see trivial things like pop culture and Elvis held in the same regard as applied mathematics or English literature. Don’t get me wrong; I freaking love pop culture, but I still consider it fluff compared to more intellectual topics. Though, in today’s world, with things like TMZ.com and Twitter and other magazines and websites dedicated to gossip and pop culture and the celebrities who inhabit those worlds, maybe Delillo wasn’t that far off when he wrote the book during the mid-1980s. Perhaps in other ten or twenty years, students WILL be able to get a bachelor’s in pop culture, etc.
Another theme that seems to drift through the book is man’s relationship with technology. Technology is seen here and there through the book, but every time it is, those passages jumped out to me as if Delillo was trying to get his point across to me. There’s a seen where Jack checks his bank account balance at an ATM, and by the way Jack narrates the transaction and the feelings that wave over him as a result, it seems almost like the ATM is a living person. Jack gets some sort of validation or acceptance of himself from the machine. Murray has a similar “relationship” with television. It fits Murray’s character since he is a pop culture professor, but he’s mesmerized by television that makes it seem like he idolizes the thing. It’s like a supreme being, feeding him knowledge and information, and Murray is entranced by this. Between these two characters, I think Delillo was trying to say something about our emotional and psychological relationship with technology.
The final, and probably most important, theme that I pulled from the book was that of death. As I stated, Jack is fearfully obsessed with death, as is his wife, Babette. They have serious conversations about how they prefer to die before the other, because they couldn’t live on. Death comes to a head for Jack after an encounter with the black chemical cloud, and it makes death a greater focus in his mind than before. It’s difficult to write about the ideas without giving too much of the plot away, but in a later chapter, Jack and Murray have a candid discussion about death, and how man deals with it and the results of it. During the talk, Jack basically throws out all the romantic and optimistic notions of death and instead approaches the subject with a cynical and literal point of view.
Overall, the book seemed like a jumble of a number of different themes and ideas that Delillo was trying to push out to the reader, and in the end, it left me a bit fuzzy and muddled. It’s the same way I felt reading dialogue between the characters, who always seemed to conversate in a disjointed, tangential way, as if they weren’t having a conversation with each other, but rather talking with themselves and only speaking in statements rather than responses. And maybe that was the point of the book and it’s title, “White Noise”. All these individual thoughts and fears and actions we have are just white noise that fill our own lives, but ultimately they lead to the same point: that we all are going to die.
