Book Review - White Noise by Don DeLillo

 White Noise by Don DeLillo

I feel ambivalent about the achievement of Don DeLillo. His body of work is extensive and influential, and he is very much the darling of academic departments, yet I find his books hard to read, clunky, and rather than deepening my thought, taking me to the shallows. The edition of White Noise I read was scattered with blurbs attesting to DeLillo's grim humour, calling it "extraordinarily funny".... well, I don't feel DeLillo's humour at all.

DeLillo himself is ambivalent - if not downright antagonistic - toward modernity. One gets the feeling he doesn't understand it at all. Jack Gladney, the protagonist in White Noise, has no sense of self, or how he fits in to society or the world. His life is reflected to us as shards of a shattered mirror, with his many marriages, his tenuous grasp on his ability as a Hitler scholar, and (the main theme of the book) his intense fear of death. And the book itself is one of shards - many different seemingly unconnected activities, mostly centred around Jack and his current wife Babette and their menagerie of children. The effect of DeLillo's choice in writing the book the way he has, is to make the reader lose any base from which to try to understand the narrative that is being presented. What I assume are DeLillo's attempts at humour come across as more sad than funny.

While we all might agree that life is chaotic and ultimately without meaning, I'm not sure that presenting a novel as such is a path to success for a writer. DeLillo's depiction of conversation is incredibly artless - absolutely divorced from anything that would resemble real conversations between people, and ultimately failing even as statements, grand or otherwise, about life, death, or the strictures that technology and the modern world put on people.

I wonder whether the problem with this novel is that it falls between two (or more) stools. It fails as a satire on the modern world because it is too serious: it fails as a serious comment on the modern world because it contains too many (failed) attempts at humour, and it fails as a novel that draws the reader in because the characterization of the main protagonists is too flat and unrealistic.

The characters of Gladney and his wife are particularly strange. Their obsessional fear of death is, in the end, pathetic. Their inability to come to terms with the inevitability of death is childish, and their musings, and those of Gladney's friend Murray, on death and what it is to live are in no way profound.

By the end of the book, I felt that this was little more than a barely coherent wail against modern life, showing no way forward, and I was glad it was over. Cosmopolis, I feel, is a better attempt to say what DeLillo wants to say, with it's more obvious unreal and experimental style. For me, White Noise was sad and disappointing.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell