White Noise by Delillo part 2

In a nutshell I found White Noise to be a self-conscious satire with interesting observations but no deeper understanding. And an obsession with supermarkets.

            Jack teaches Hitler studies in a small college town on the edge of Iron City. He’s married to his fourth wife, Babette, and they live with their four children from various marriages. Babette reads tabloid papers to an old blind man and teaches classes in sitting, standing, and walking at the community center. 15 year old Heinrich is skeptical of everything (including whether it is currently raining or not) and is the sort of person who will constantly refresh Google news for the updated death toll in the latest disaster. 12 year old Denise is a miniature adult worried about the medication her mother may or may not be taking. 9 year old Steffie is Denise-lite. Lastly, young Wilder, who I could have sworn was 2 from the way he acts but online sources says is 6, never speaks and, to be quite blunt, comes across as retarded. The story is told from the 1^st person POV of Jack who, other than being kind of nebbish, has no personality. Ready to read 326 pages about these people?

            Jack goes about his daily existence until a tanker carrying the dangerous Nyodene D crashes near their town releasing a toxic cloud of chemicals. An evacuation is called for but during the escape Jack is forced to stop for gas, exposing himself for two minutes. (This was a point of difficulty for me because the way the event is described they’re outside the radius of the cloud.) He’s told that this exposure could prove to be a fatal problem at some point in the next thirty years. Then life goes back to normal.

            The rest of the book is more of the first part of the book, except there’s more anxiety about death. (This was in the pre-cloud part too. Jack and Babette like to argue about who would rather die first. The foreshadowing is less shadowing and more penciling in.) Jack discovers Babette has been keeping a secret from him and she manages to belittle his place in her life while loading her confession with an incredible amount of bathos. In the end Jack tries, in his ineffectual and bumbling way, to reassert control over his life, Wilder nearly gets himself flattened by rush hour traffic, and the whole thing fades off into the produce section.

Throughout, brand names are thrown around like invocations, dating the text even more. While looking at clouds at sunset we suddenly get the line, “Clorets, Velamints, Freedent.” Thank goodness for Wikipedia, purveyor of random information. While sleeping, one of Jack’s daughters breathes the words, “Toyota Celica.” I’ve never heard of that particular model but I’m sure their commercials were awesome. Random lines from the ever present TV and radio litter the text until they’re actually coming out of the mouth of a passerby, culminating in a torrent of nonsensical information from a drug-fried character at the end. Rather than being intrusive I liked how these lines remind the reader of the constant barrage of information and advertising that floods our lives. The naming of products out of context was less subtle and kind of silly.

            On the whole, this was a well written book. Events progressed nicely, plots points were wrapped up, and the descriptive passages were very good. His imagery of the toxic event, with the ever expanding cloud lit by helicopters and the refugees trudging along under the falling snow, was very evocative. The prose was generally readable and with only a few stutters flowed well.

            One final complaint: the dialogue was horrible. With few exceptions all characters had the same unrealistic speech patterns. Even a German accented woman eventually started monologing the same way as everyone else. It was like Don Delillo’s voice was coming out of multiple mouths, eventually giving me the creepy sensation that there were no individual characters at all but rather some sort of hive mind parroting the author’s internal thoughts. Like a master puppeteer having conversations with himself through proxies.

            This was a decent enough book but I don’t think it aged well and I couldn’t connect with it. Maybe if I had been more aware during the ‘80’s it would have more resonance with me. I’ll have to read Delillo’s more recent work to see how he’s changed.

*Clorets is apparently a type of gum now mainly available in stores in South America, the Middle East, and S.E. Asia. You can, of course, buy it on Amazon.

Velamints appear to be a mint. Surprisingly, they do not have a Wikipedia page. They do have their own Facebook page which informs all that they’re back.

Now I thought Freedent might be a dental adhesive but it is, in fact, a type of gum. It’s advertised as not sticking to dental appliances.