Introduction by Mark Osteen
White Noise has often been dubbed Don DeLillo's 'breakout book.' This term is usually meant in one of two ways: either that the work has achieved greater commercial success than an author's previous works, or that it has raised the author's art to a higher level. In the case of White Noise, the second is arguable, but the first is definitely true, for the novel garnered the best reviews and strongest sales of DeLillo's career to that point. It is not difficult to understand why it became one of the most widely acclaimed fictional works of the 1980s: its mordantly witty anatomy of the postnuclear family; its sly satire of television, advertising, and academia; its letter-perfect portrayal of the sounds and sights of supermarkets, malls, and tabloids all strike chords that reverberate strongly with contemporary Americans.
When White Noise was first published in January 1985, reviewers were struck by its timeliness; indeed, appearing only a month after a toxic chemical leak at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, killed some 2,500 people, DeLillo's novel-with an 'airborne toxic event' at its center-seemed almost eerily prescient. Although a few reviewers criticized its plot (or alleged plotlessness), found its witticisms too clever, or accused the author of 'trendiness,' these voices were drowned out by a chorus of praise. As they did in his earlier novels, reviewers recognized the validity of DeLillo's insights about the oppressive effects of contemporary cultural institutions and applauded the astonishing linguistic gifts White Noise displays in its sparkling dialogue and in Jack Gladney's alternately bemused, frightened, and self-critical narrative voice. Many readers found Gladney more approachable than the alienated protagonists of DeLillo's previous works; many adults- especially, I suspect, academics-would echo Gladney's blend of denunciation of and baffled appreciation for popular culture. But the novel's most immediately appealing quality is its humor: it's simply a very funny book. I remember reading aloud to friends Jack and Babette's precoital conversation about 'entering,' Heinrich's stubborn refusal to accept his senses' evidence of rain, and the uproarious one-upmanship of the American Environments department. Although DeLillo's earlier novels were also humorous, they carried a more sardonic, Swiftian edge that lacerated with a cooler precision. Many readers have found White Noise's humor more palatable because it is leavened by a warmth and compassion less obvious in DeLillo's earlier work.
Much of this warm comedy is derived from DeLillo's slightly skewed depiction of the postmodern family, where the once-solid core of mom, dad, and kids has given way to a loose aggregate of siblings, step-siblings, and ex- spouses rotating in various impermanent groupings. Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies at the College-on- the-Hill in a town called Blacksmith, has four children: Mary Alice (age 19) and Steffie (9), from his first and second marriages to Dana Breed-love; Heinrich (14), from his marriage to Janet Savory (now known as Mother Devi); and Bee (12), from his marriage to Tweedy Browner. Only Heinrich and Steffie live with Jack. His wife Babette's three children are Denise (age 11), Eugene (8), and Wilder (about 2). As Thomas Ferraro points out, since Wilder is not Jack's child, this 'family' can have been together no more than two years; moreover, not one child is living with a full sibling (Ferraro 1991, 17). This condition of permanent impermanence affects all of Blacksmith, a place of 'tag sales and yard sales' where 'failed possessions' testify to failed marriages (White Noise, 59). Things change so rapidly that even the family members seem unclear about the details. No wonder Jack sees the family as the 'cradle of the world's misinformation' (81).
But though the family's handle on facts is hilariously shaky, their conversations also suggest the unfunny results of living in a high-technology society: there is abundant information around, but nobody seems to know anything. And just as the family members gorge themselves with disposable information and fast food, so are they also inundated by consumer goods, not only when they visit the supermarket and the mall, but also when they are at home watching television, which they seem to do constantly. Indeed, White Noise is preoccupied with consumerism and with the values inherent in a consumer society. DeLillo's treatment of these ubiquitous features of contemporary life is surprisingly balanced: although he satirizes the family's addictions, he gives many of the best lines to Jack's colleague Murray Jay Siskind, who enthusiastically celebrates television and shopping as contemporary religious rituals. DeLillo dramatizes the omnipresence of TV and consumerism by punctuating the scenes with disembodied electronic voices and lists of brand names. Simultaneously attesting to the novel's highly textured realism and violating it by reminding us of the author's controlling presence, these mysterious, often acerbic insertions are one reason the novel has been called 'postmodern.'
Another reason is that White Noise flouts the conventions it seems to invoke, imitating a number of different genres, but ultimately fitting none of them. For example, the relatively plotless part 1 presents itself as a hyperintelligent TV sitcom, complete with brainy children, zany friends, and banal conflicts. Even here, however, DeLillo alludes to deeper disturbances: Jack and Babette debate about who will die first; Wilder ululates at length for no apparent reason. Things turn much darker when, in part 2, the family is forced to flee a toxic leak; the book begins to resemble a disaster thriller, except that DeLillo is less interested in providing graphic descriptions of poisoning than in tracing its subtler, long-term effects, especially on Jack, who is exposed to the toxic substance and hence 'tentatively scheduled to die' (202). No longer comforted by hunkering in Hitler's penumbra, and bereft of strong ties to religion, community, or family, Jack becomes desperately obsessed with his mortality. The novel seems to veer into a midlife crisis tale. But Jack doesn't take up skydiving or learn to box. Instead, after learning that Babette has been involved in a secret experiment involving Dylar, a drug designed to dispel the fear of death, he schemes to get some at any cost. Jack's less attractive qualities-self-absorption, hypocrisy, rage-emerge, prompting him to devise an implausible plot that itself seems to come from a TV movie. Yet Jack's alternately ludicrous and pathetic confrontation with his nemesis neither solves his problem nor resolves the plot, which does not, after all, 'move death-ward' (26). With this enigmatic, postmodernist conclusion, the novel moves beyond all the formulae it has employed.
Even those who cherish the novel's comedy cannot ignore its deeply ominous undercurrent, for White Noise is most of all a profound study of the American way of death: one of DeLillo's working titles was 'The American Book of the Dead.' It gains much of its remarkable resonance from its unflinching depiction of the nameless fear pervading postmodern society. Like Murray Siskind, DeLillo is particularly interested in 'American magic and dread,' and his novel dramatizes how our obsessions with exercise and disease, our millennialist religions, our tabloid stories of resurrection and celebrity worship, and our compulsive consumerism offer charms to counteract the terror of oblivion.
White Noise is thus also a novel about religion-or, perhaps more accurately, about belief. Like DeLillo's later novel, Mao II (1991), it asks, 'When the old God leaves the world, what happens to all the unexpended faith?' (Mao II, 7). DeLillo has long been attracted to books that 'open out onto some larger mystery' (LeClair 1982, 26); White Noise is such a book, one that alludes constantly to what lies just beyond our hearing, to the mysterious, the untellable, the numinous-to what DeLillo calls the 'radiance in dailiness' (see page 330 of this volume). The novel defamiliarizes our familiar world by listening to the sounds and listing the products and places-television, supermarkets, and shopping centers, as well as 'The Airport Marriott, the Downtown Travelodge, the Sheraton Inn and Conference Center' (White Noise, 15)-that channel the spiritual yearnings of contemporary Americans. In White Noise we revisit those temples where Americans seek '[p]eace of mind in a profit-oriented context' (87).
Despite its undeniable originality, White Noise also reprises the themes and strategies of DeLillo's earlier works. Like his first three novels, it features a first-person narrator who maintains an uneasy relationship with mass culture. David Bell, the protagonist of DeLillo's first novel, Americana (1971), drops out of his job at a television network to make an autobiographical film scrutinizing Americans' worship of televised and advertised images. In one scene (reprinted here on page 335), a character in Bell 's film calls television 'an electronic form of packaging,' a phrase that White Noise retransmits in its recurrent litanies of brand names and broadcast
