White Noise (novel)

White Noise is a novel by Don DeLillo, and is considered a landmark in postmodern literature. It won the American Book Award.

Related Topics:
Don DeLillo - Postmodern literature - American Book Award

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Set at a bucolic eastern college, White Noise follows a year in the life of Jack Gladney, a professor who has made his name by pioneering the field of Hitler Studies (though he doesn't speak German). We meet his large, extended family: he's been married several times and has a brood of children and step-children with his wife, Babette. In its first half, White Noise is a chronicle of absurdist family life combined with academic satire.

Related Topics:
Professor - Hitler - German - Satire

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In the second half, a chemical spill from a railcar releases an Airborne Toxic Event over Jack's home region, causing an evacuation. Frightened by his exposure to the Airborne Toxic Event, Gladney is forced to confront his mortality. Soon the novel becomes a meditation on modern society's fear of death and our obsession with chemical cures as Gladney searches out a black market drug called Dylar.

Related Topics:
Black market - Drug - Dylar

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White Noise's importance to literature lies in its exploration of all the themes that have emerged of the past thirty years: rampant consumerism, media saturation, novelty intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and re-integration of the family, and the promise of rebirth through violence.

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In an interview with DeCurtis, DeLillo himself stated: "In White Noise in particular, I tried to find a kind of radiance in dailiness. Sometimes this radiance can be almost frightening. Other times it can be almost holy or sacred.... Our sense of fear--we avoid it because we feel it so deeply, so there is an intense conflict at work.... I think it is something we all feel, something we almost never talk about, something that is almost there. I tried to relate it in White Noise to this other sense of transcendence that lies just beyond our touch. This extraordinary wonder of things is somehow related to the extraordinary dread, to the death fear we try to keep beneath the surface of our perceptions."

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Barry Sonnenfeld is preparing a film version of White Noise for 2006. IMDB This project should not be confused with the 2004 film White Noise directed by Geoffrey Sax. IMDB

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