Episode 27: Filtering the Static in Don DeLillo's WHITE NOISE

Great American Novel

Often hailed as the quintessential exemplum of Reagan-era postmodernism, Don DeLillo's eighth novel, White Noise (1985), is part academic satire, part media excoriation, and part exploration of the "simulacrum" or simulated feel of everyday life. With its absurdist asides on the iconicity of both Elvis and Hitler, the unrelenting stress of consumer choices (the supermarket is the site of modern neuroses), and the pharmacopic management of anxiety, the novel can sometimes feel a little smirky, a little too self-consciously zany, in its treatment of 1980s' suburban life. But readers interested in what DeLillo has to say about the emotional connections between husbands and wives and fathers and children will find a deeper, more somber effort to de-clutter the static of misinformation systems and chemical controls, whether in the blood or in the air, to forge organic bonds. To call White Noise the Babbitt of the "Greed is Good" era is no slight---DeLillo may have written better and more important books (including Libra, his treatment of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination) but this is the novel that best captures the weird unease of the second-to-last decade of the twentieth century.