"White Noise" by Don DeLillo


Read: 2/5/09

2/5 stars

Another comedy that I don't understand. And no, this book has nothing to do with the Michael Keaton movie of the same title. "White Noise" comes highly recommended. It won the US National Book Award in 1985 and is on the Time 100 Best Novels list. But I believe I've read enough of critically-acclaimed books to know that not all of them are to my taste or even what I would consider good reads. Nevertheless, I persist in my plan of reading these critics' favorites because I would like to decide for myself.

My decision on this one is that I am annoyed.

White Noise is supposed to be a book of the times, a book that chronicles the state of a nation. So, yes, DeLillo satirizes American consumerism and the ubiquity of media in this post-modern novel. But I seriously never liked post-modernism overly intellectualized, especially when it doesn't tries to be witty but fails horribly.

Among the book's characters are a professor who's a leading expert in Hitler studies, his wife who is a guinea pig for an experimental pharmaceutical, the assortment of children and stepchildren of the couple, and another cultural-studies obssessed academic. The story's conflict takes on palpable form with the threat of a poisonous gas released into the atmosphere after a train accident. Townspeople near the accident scramble for safety--and do reach it--but not without the permanent realization of the presence of death in their otherwise comfortable lives.

I did think some of the ideas intriguing. For instance, one character says of movie car crashes:
"They can't think of a car crash in a movie as a violent act. It's a celebration. A reaffirmation of traditional values and beliefs...Look past the violence. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun."
I thought that deconstruction was clever. What I did not appreciate, though, was the arrogance of the characters, which stems from their apparent superiority due to knowledge. The academics were tiresome, the children were tiresome, the women were tiresome. And I am aware that DeLillo may have intended it this way to achieve his satire, but he was just too successful for me.

Moreover, I do not like how most of the characters speak the same way. Lines such as "This is the point of Babette" or "This is how we advance the art of human consciousness" come from a lot of the characters, not just one. And these lines are so arrogant, so secure in their surety, but you realize that there is no assurance at all, even with these characters. They just like pretending and assuming. Now, if that's meant to be funny, excuse me if I don't laugh.

White Noise was meant to be a metaphor for all the useless background stimuli that they receive, which they might feel constitutes the meaning of their lives. This is why, throughout the story, there pops out some blurb from an ad. Clever design, true, but I really had no compassion nor empathy for the characters, which is why i didn't like it.

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