White Noise: (Penguin Orange Collection)

Jack Gladney is a college professor in the middle of a mid life crisis. He has no idea of who he is. He hides his emptiness behind thick, dark framed glasses, a scholarly university instructors' robe, and mastery of his academic interest of choice, "Hitler studies". He sees death everywhere he looks and attempts to thwart its inevitability in obsessive compulsive ways. He hoards old, worthless, sentimental objects. He memorizes the most minute trivial facts about Hitler. He to strives for order, neatness, and predictability in all facets of his life. The quest for order permeates every facet of his life, down to which kind of cereal he buys. His family life is in shambles. His wife and children co-habitate the same home, yet there is little real contact between any of them. The family TV is the central point in the home and serves as a buffer to reality. To the Gladney family,"Bad things", happen on TV, to people in California, not in their little community. When an industrial accident brings Jack face to face with real danger, Jack is forced to examine his own magical thinking. He is forced to take an inventory of what is truly important to him. He comes to the inevitable crossroads where he must decide if he will change or if he will not. The novel is very humorous is a dark, satirical way. Jack is a representation of the American consumer more than he is a "real" charachter. The book does not end in "neat little package". Rather, it ends with a sense of hopeful uncertainty. If you are looking for a Tom Clancy type novel with well defined charachters in a well defined plot that comes to a well defined end, take a pass on his novel. If you are interested in a darkly humorous examination of American culture which can be simultaneously funny, yet also tragic and disturbing, this is your book. I very highly recommend it.

In White Noise, Don Delillo sets out to explore a topic that as relevant and fascinating today as it was when the novel was first written - our fast-changing and confusing world, where knowledge is ephemeral and technology has infiltrated every corner of our lives. While the message is clear and captivating, it repeatedly bludgeons the reader over the head. The characters are neither independent nor interesting. Rather than being human beings eliciting some kind of emotional reaction from the reader, they're used more like cheap conduits for the themes of the novel. The dialogue is often wooden and unnatural, and though it often touches on philosophical musings that would make the reader pause and think, the effectiveness of the message is compromised by how ludicrous it sounds coming out the mouths of these characters. Delillo uses satire well, and the bits of absurd humour do lighten an otherwise heavy load. The last thirty pages are a surrealistic romp that conveys the mood of the story far better than the rest of the novel preceding them. While the reader can appreciate Delillo's mastery of the language, one starts to wonder whether the novel suffers from an excess of a good thing.

When I first read the title I thought it was a controversial book on race issues, but it turned out be a satire on a society influenced by pressing technology and mass media. The protagonist is a college professor with a neurotic family. The author doesn't really do much in the character development on a personal level, but does an outstanding job in developing them through what they encounter on a day to day basis. This in my mind keeps to what I think the books tries to speak about; how the agents of technology shapes us, and this book does a superb job on a level of inanity that's enjoyable to read.

I found "White Noise" very entertaining. It was a twist on what goes on in the average family. DeLillo does a fantastic job of creating the atmosphere of normality and contrasts it with what really goes on behind the scenes of the Gladney family. Consumerism, death, and oddly enough, humor play a huge part in the novel. It was humorous to read the conversations of the family members and picture the way they interacted. DeLillo is very insightful of the regular occurrences that take place in a family. He puts a twist on going to the grocery store and watching a burning building. He depicts what many people in American society deny today about buying material things and what they really mean to us. I favored this novel because it was not difficult to understand and the themes of the novel were easy to pick out. The criticisms tend to be a bit more difficult to get through although the Duvall essay to be quite interesting and insightful. Duvall takes specific passages and analyzes them to bring out another point of view other than the readers. I would recommend this novel to anyone who appreciates a new perspective on things.

I read this novel after Underworld and enjoyed it on a different level. On the surface, this novel is so humorous that I laughed out loud multiple times at the comical situations and bizarre characters that are presented. The plot suggests the potential for a comic look at modern consumerism, academia, government, and family life. It centers around Jack Gladney, a professor in Hitler studies and his neurotic family. The first half of the novel portrays their life surrounded by the hum of appliances, the vacuous pronouncements on television, academia so devoid of meaning that they have seminars on car crash films, and supermarkets raised to the status of a modern temple with their bright slogans and products from all over the globe. Obsession with death is also a prominent theme possibly because there is no meaning or purpose to be found in their world completely enveloped by consumerism. In this world, spiritual comfort comes from the tabloids. The second half of the novel continues along the same course but after a toxic spill has contaminated the entire town. The reader appreciates how ephemeral our society is and how we have advanced so little in the arenas that truly matter. When everything is suddenly stripped away, the family is left with very little both spiritually and even useful survival skills.

Certainly there is an undercurrent of emptiness and a description of a void in modern society that underlies the novel. Yet the comedic elements and quirky characters that populate the novel allow us to consider the bleaker elements while at the same time finding humour in our predicament. I highly recommend this book.

I read this book for an english class in college. This was the most modern book we read in the class and was probably the most entertaining to read. DeLillo is extraordinarily funny. His writing parallels today's society although it is a decade older. His consumeristic view point leads the reader from one token of modernization to another. While one might laugh at the absurdity of the characters one is at the same time comparing those characters to him or herself. However, the brilliance of this novel is short lived. Although DeLillo shows us how to laugh at ourselves he does little else. The reader is left with little more than a few chuckles and disbelief. I have found that attempting a thorough analysis of this text is the quickest prescription for an aneurysm.

Don Delillo, author of White Noise, wrote a classic with this book. A story about a family consumed with fear of death didn't seem like one I wanted to read, but when you get into the story, you begin to like it more and more. The book is filled with humorous events and a glimpse into what people really make of the world. The characters in the book look way into simple things like grocery shopping and television. They are always thinking that the other is more afraid, constantly arguing over it without any real knowledge. The book is an easy read, and one that will keep your interest. This book is considered a satire of consumerism and technology in america, and it definately is. The characters take each of these into depth, always giving you something to look at. After reading this book, you will question your motives somewhat when you go out, either to the movies, to eat or go shopping. I truly enjoyed this book and would reccomend it to anyone.

First you must know- not think, but know- that someday you are going to die.

Once you can admit that to yourself, let DeLillo shatter you.

This book is often reviewed as a rant against commercialism and our modern consumer culture. And that's true. But at it's core this is a book about death. More specifically, our overpowering fear and obsession with death.

I could bore you with a plot summary, but I won't. Nothing I could say about this book can come close to what DeLillo has to say. He's a master wordsmith. Some will peg him as verbose and heavy handed. Those terms would be derogatory if every word WERE NOT pure gold. The man is spitting pearls as us and people want to fault him for wordiness. With the dearth of great literature that we are currently suffering through, how could anyone fault DeLillo for having TOO MUCH to say?

Those who have been reading Palahniuk for the last 6 years (that's right- you saw the movie first), it's time to move on. Chuck is brilliant and I love him, but DeLillo is the old lion that taught the cubs how to hunt. There'd be no Palahniuks or Bret Easton Ellis's if DeLillo hadn't done it first.

Is this his best book? No- you'll get to "Libra" eventually. But this is where you start.

Happy hunting kiddies.

I was recently reading about the Nobel Prize for Literature, and how its history is tainted with questionable winners. For example, in 1962 John Steinbeck won the award and his philosophy as a writer was criticized for being simple and superficial. When Steinbeck himself was asked if he should have won, he said something like, “Probably not.” Don Delillo is not a complicated novelist in White Noise. It’s refreshing to see his use of ordinary characters in white-collar circumstances. The daughters and step-daughters and sons were all interestingly crafted, mostly due to their emotional calmness in contrast to their intellectual curiosity. These were all smart characters, such as Denise, Heinrich, and Steffie, although sometimes I could not tell the girls apart. Then there is Murray the eccentric, and the other minor cast of college professors, part of the book only for roundtable dialogue about free association thinking.
The “Airborne Toxic Event” fits the plot because it doesn’t fit at the family dinner table. When it happens it consumes the book; nothing else matters. When it’s over, the only lingering effect to keep it from being episodic is the fear of death “Dylar” drug. But then the factoid nature of all the family conversations, never emotional as they normally would be, are replaced by a man on his third of fourth wife placidly discovering and confronting his wife’s affair with an experimental drug peddler. With the title and the many references to television, which the book never resolved as a motif, I thought maybe the bad passions had been drained from us by overexposure to facts, to television. Delillo doesn’t follow through: the “chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill” does want to shoot his wife’s enabler and exploiter three times in the abdomen and get away with it. It does matter; there was just no yelling in the process.
What becomes of a story about death when all of the conversations are eventually about death? Murray and Babette and the children that jump from subplot to subplot, such as the boy who wants to live over two months with snakes for a world record, are unwittingly white noise. Delillo is a family author. The activities teetering on meaninglessness and dangerous progress don’t mean to be “white noise,” or junk. He crafted these characters based on their abilities, and then he just left the children and the wife, with whom it is not possible to sympathize, out of the end of the book. What is happening to them? There was no reason to make step-parents come and go if they are all over themselves any way. All of the stories became incidental, but at least they happened in nice neighborhoods.
Heinrich took the words right out of my mouth on page 147. He lectures people about our advancement. “What is electricity? What is light?” He talks about our technology being ready for our use, but he recognizes that almost none of us could go back in time and create what has been created for us. I’m trying to decide if this is a highlight of Delillo’s premises. Our scientific advances leave us further behind what we should know.

White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at a small college. He's on his fourth wife, Babbette and has four kids and what I think most of us would say is an excessive fear of modern life and of his own death. Of the book Mr. DeLillo has said :
[A]ll I can say about White Noise...is that the book is driven by a connection I sensed between advanced technology and contemporary fear. By the former I don't mean bombs and missiles alone but more or less everything -- microwaves, electrical insulation etc. One would have to write a long dense essay to explain this connection adequately -- that's why I wrote a loose-limbed and shadow-sliding work of fiction.
As it happens, Jack's fear of technology turns out to be justified when a toxic chemical cloud is unleashed in the area and he is terminally poisoned. But it is in his fear of death that I think Mr. DeLillo loses his way.
Jack fears death precisely because he believes in nothing. For such a person the self is all that matters, so the prospect of one's own death must be terrifying. For with your own death the world, for all intents and purposes, comes to an end. Your own death is the Apocalypse. Now, Jack has a friend, Murray Jay Siskind, who serves as kind of the Greek chorus of the book. When Jack is dying, Murray tells him :
"I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don't have the disposition, the rage or whatever it takes to be a killer. We let death happen. We lie down and die. But think what it's like to be a killer. Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number ofÊ massacres, wars, executions."
This theory also explains much of the 20th century--from genocide to abortion--if we accept that murder has become a way for a people who no longer believe in anything beyond themselves to try to pretend that they have some kind of power over death. But it is of course a delusion. All the murders in the world--as Jack's subject, Hitler, demonstrates--won't extend your life by one minute. And even if they could, what would be the point, since we've already decided that our lives are meaningless?
So what Mr. DeLillo has done here is to set up an elaborate joke. We can see how foolish these beliefs are and how destructive. It's clear that such theories, though intended to empower us, have left us empty; our lives dissatisfying; our mortality devastating, even though inevitable; and the morality which once gave our lives a sense of purpose discardedso that we may pursue personal pleasures which fail to fulfill. surely the point of the novel, after all this, must be that this is all a huge mistake. Right? We have to have been building to the moment when Toto rips away the curtain and the post-modern Wizard is exposed as a fraud, haven't we? The answer, inexplicably, is : no. And so we feel the air rush out of the balloon just as we thought Mr. DeLillo was ready to let it fly.
Jack does indeed try to claim a life credit by hunting down the quack who's been giving the drug Dylar--sort of an anticipation of Prozac that quiets fears--to Babbette. But there's nothing empowering about the scene; it's merely embarrassing. When Jack takes himself and his victim, both wounded, to the hospital, he meets a nun, Sister Hermann Marie. He questions her about her faith, but she reveals that the religious have none either, their seeming piety is all an act :
"It is for others. Not for us."
"But that's ridiculous. what others?"
"All the others. The others who spend their lives believing that we still believe. It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely, the human race would die. This is why we are here.Ê A tiny minority. To embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse."
It is here that Mr. DeLillo goes too far because he shows us that the joke is apparently on him.Ê He seems to be a Jack Gladney, believing nothing, obsessed with death, one of T.S. Eliot's hollow men. That suffices to make him ridiculous, but he goes beyond that to claim that those who are not withered up must be pretending to believe in something, and to claim that even the pretend believers are a tiny minority, dwarfed by the more honest unbelievers. This is simply untrue, at least here in America, where the great majority have utterly traditional and conventional religious beliefs and a certainty that every life has a purpose..
The extreme skeptics though have always been a part of Western Civilization and they always will be. For the perverse truth is that we can not even prove that we exist, that we are not merely a dream. Actually, no one has yet bettered Samuel Johnson's amusing but unsatisfactory response when asked how he would refute Hume or Berkeley's theory that we can not know with certainty that anything exists. Dr. Johnson turned and kicked a boulder, saying : "I refute it thus!" But not even the skeptics (and Johnson was one) can accept the implications of their own ideas, else they'd give up. They'd certainly not try to communicate ideas if those ideas mean nothing. If the post-modernists had the courage of their convictions they not write, and even the best of them, an Albert Camus or a Don DeLillo, would not be much missed.
GRADE : C

There isn't much to type about DeLillo's work that hasn't been typed; by now, you should already know the deal on White Noise.

It is a satiric look at the consumerism of American society through a very postmodern lens. Make no mistake, this is surreal writing. You can relate to some of the characters, but in any full, deep sense of the way like you could with a book of more traditional style. In White Noise, the characters are mere products of society, purposefully built up to be spiritually empty and mentally limited.

DeLillo's narrator is Jack Gladney, and ends up being the sole voice in the novel, an intentional device to monotonize the speech of the characters in the book and fully illustrate the dulling effect (DeLillo says) consumerism has on people. Philosophy is spouted not just from adults but from EVERYONE except the child, Wilder (an important detail) and it echoes throughout the prose. The chatter of faxes, radios and televisions pervades the text, creating a veritable literary prosopopoeia of the Title.

One should know going in, however, the DeLillo's prejudices are as numerous as his influences, and anyone who is easily offended by alternative takes on American society better get ready to be offended. Just like Pynchon, DeLillo is intent on deconstructing the idea of any sort of unified national, historical or existential persona, and the sarcasm he thrusts at concepts and norms that we are so familiar with and perhaps attached to will easily instigate anger in many.

Still, no one can deny the depth of this novel's architecture and the breadth of its commentary. I don't care if you hate intellectualism to death or if you call all postmodern authors writers of pretentious, turgid tripe--there is absolutely no denying that DeLillo's work here is complex, original and worthy of praise.

(...)

If you hate postmodernism, fine. It's not everyone's cup of tea. Maybe you'll like White Noise's commentary, maybe you'll hate it. It's not everyone's cup of tea. But a potent cup it is, rich, dark and complex in its nuances and sources. Hate it all you want, White Noise is a (at times coldly) intellectual tour-de-force of satire and commentary.

But don't worry; it's no Gravity's Rainbow.

This album takes no getting used to, as the punchy rhythms, clean guitars, and minor-key melodic vocals all come together to hit a striking chord with the ears. Imagine a less arrogant, more straight forward "AIR", and you have Alpinestars "White Noise". I bought this album after hearing just one track, and have not regretted it for a single moment! Buy this disc with a newfound hope for good music in the 21st century.

The genius of DeLillo in White Noise is that he captures in often hilarious and horrifying ways the postmodern reconfiguring of our society, a society so drenched with media and pop culture. For example, he makes the tv (notice the lower casing, DeLillo's move to both make the television more accepted, a regular word, and remove its power, take away its aggressive caps) a family member and has it say things at random throughout the novel.
The essential "plot" of the novel revolves around Jack Gladney who in grand academic fashion has created a Hitler studies department--despite the fact he can't speak German, and his grappling with his fear of death. Sounds exciting right? It's not Grisham, but it's playfully philosophical, humorous in dark ways, and ultimately a great critique of all the white noise in our lives (like I said it ain't no Grisham). Gladney discovers his wife--who's also scared to death of death--is taking a pill that relieves all fear of mortality. By the end of the novel, Gladney finds his wife's supplier where the plot takes an incredibly bizarre turn reminiscent of the end of Lolita. I wont give away the end except to quote, "Men have tried throughout history to cure themselves of death by killing others."
You shouldn't read it for just the plot, but all the noise along the way. At one point the Gladneys experience what the media dubs The Airborne Toxic Event, an unexplained occurrence full of paranoia. Gladney has a lecture duel with another professor over who is more important culturally, Hitler or Elvis? His son corresponds with a killer. His daughter sitting in front of the tv, "moved her lips, attempting to match the words as they were spoken." The characters view the supermarket as our Tibetan Book of Dead. One of my favorite comic scenes involves the SIMUVAC using the real evacuation as a rehearsal for their simulation.
Look at what we've all come to:
"In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents. . . . Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. . . . The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies."
This is a wonderful and important book! A great the store purchase. Also recommended: ...by Tom Grimes, The Losers' Club by Richard Perez

I don't understand how this novel is getting endless amounts of bad reviews. I enjoyed every second of it. I had to read it for an English literature course, and it was the only book out of all the ones I've read for the course that I actually learned something from. It reveals so many truths about modern society and its obsession with buying and owning. It does reveal to us how our lives revolve around the media, and how we take things at face value and don't question things. Just like Murray Jay Siskind tells Jack Gladney. "There are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don't have the disposition, the rage or whatever it takes to be a killer. We let death happen. We lie down and die." (Page 290) We, as a society, sit back as the world passes by, in our little bubbles, watching our televisions, buying copious amounts of merchandise we see in advertisements. The novel opened my eyes to the reality of the consumerist, capitalist American society. I live in Canada, but similar things happen here. The First World is so preoccupied with themselves that they don't even notice what is happening around them.

Like the "toxic airborne event," as we watch chemical spills and similar events on the news, but we don't care. The news people don't care, the only people who care are the ones who are experiencing the tragic events.

Jack's children are growing up in this consumerism-obsessed world, that the media and everything around them have huge impacts on their lives - even in their dreams! One night when Jack is watching his children sleep, he notices Steffie murmuring, and he picks up on two words. She says "Toyota Celica." A child, in innocent sleep, murmuring the name of an automobile....what do we make of that?

Overall, the novel did give way to different thoughts in my mind, and it was one of the better novels I have read in my lifetime. It has become one of my favourites, and I'm sure it will be for a while.

White Noise is honestly the best book I have ever read. The book by Don Delillo is based around an average suburban family named the Gladney's. Jack the husband is a professor of Hitler studies at an University and his wife Babette teaches classes on the proper way to sit and stand. Between Jack, Babette and several other marriages several children are introduced in the book and each seems to bring an interesting twist. The whole book is humorous and yet very morbid. Three main themes seem to show up throughout the book. These consist of Death, Sex and Consumerism. We see how these to people deal with the lingering thought of Death. Are we all just waiting to die and can buying material possessions make you feel better along the way? That is the question the book seems to be really asking.
This book is very enjoyable and you may find like myself that you have a hard time putting the book down.

If a work of art is supposed to harness the resources at the disposal of its medium in service of a message, this book is a true work of art. It effectively communicates the disjointed, unsettled, alienating nature of modern life, parodies the detachment of both academia and modern parenting, and skewers the modern merged family. It shows off the facile satisfaction, and indeed, beauty of consumerism, and makes a dig through the household rubbish of a family into sacred augury. And behind, or under, or over it all, lies the ever-present fear of death - perhaps a bit too thickly.

For my money, this is DeLillo's best book. Though I certainly admired the artistry of Underworld, I had a tough time getting emotionally engaged in the narrative. White Noise pulls off the hard task of weaving a compelling human story peppered with all the disturbing weirdness that's come to define this unique novelist's body of work.

Few novels I've read have been as effective as White Noise in creating a sense of impending doom placed within a recognizably "normal" setting. From the first few pages, we get the feeling something undeniably malignant is creeping in, and that sensation accelerates as the plot progresses.

Definitely a great book to start with if you've never read any DeLillo.

Unlike some of the more vehement DeLillo detractors, I don't so much dislike the man's work as much as I find that the novel as a form itself simply isn't the proper venue for his ideas. In fact, I've found that his seldom read dramatic works are much more effective and moving, particularly 1999's "Valparaiso," a play which covered so much of the same thematic ground as this book that it could be seen as an adaptation. The more restrictive nature of dramatic writing gives his work a focus that is sorely lacking in his prose.

The most controversial element of DeLillo's work is his dialogue, which is flagrantly non-realistic. Essentially, all of his characters speak in a single, erudite, cynical voice, with the only occasional variant being that he sometimes writes his protagonists as straight men to this silliness. The joke of DeLillo (there's really only one) is that he describes everyday phenomena in an absurdly unnatural stream of latinate adjectives, usually from the mouth of children, housewives and other unlikely sources. Essentially it's a breezier version of Nicholson Baker's loveably overeducated wit. Although to be fair, Baker is ultimately a more skilled writer, which is probably why DeLillo relies so much more heavily on quotation marks.

It's wickedly funny stuff, but only in small doses. By the end of White Noise, I found the clinical descriptions of sadness and dashboards tiresome. Which goes back to my original point; in more truncated, structured forms, DeLillo's writing is quite brilliant. But when he expands his ideas to three-hundred pages or more, it comes off as heartless and numbing.

Within Don Delillo's White Noise, the term poetry in motion isn't the first thing to come to mind. White Noise is a perfect example of chaos theory. When the author takes to the role of the mad scientist and the readers are the test subjects. The novel can be described as a maze where you think you're making progress as to what is truly taking place, yet as you progress through the novel you realize that you've started over several times. Throughout this wonderland thriller you may find yourself with more questions than answers. Yet as you make your way through this wild journey down the rabbit hole and back you would be pleasantly surprise at the outcome of it all. Don Delillo's White Noise to most considered to be a work of postmodernism, simply because the acts of the characters within can be said to be their own. Yet when you look deeper into the novel you will see that its inner workings describe the very society in which we live in. This picture is painted vividly as the story progresses.
The story is surrounded by the life and times of the narrator Jack Gladney. Jack is employed as a professor at the local college. Jack is married to Babette Gladney, a teacher of adult education classes, which also happens to be his fourth wife. This couple has children which they brought separately to the marriage. Together they share four children in total, Wilder and Denise who both came from the previous marriages of Babette and Heinrich and Steffie who belong to Jack from other relationships. This typical family exists in the small college town of Blacksmith.
Jack Gladney is the chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. Jack invented this field of study in 1968. His goal was to exemplify the historical significance of Adolf Hitler. This internationally popular topic has brought much in regards to prominence and an air of dignity to Gladney. Every move Jack makes within his career is surrounded by the central goal of adding to his reputation. He even makes a name change to make it seem like he is a distinguished individual. But to everyone's surprise and yet no one's surprise it is brought to the reader's attention that Mr. Gladney can't speak German. This in itself is weird because his field of study is about a notorious German Dictator. So he spends quite some secretly trying to learn German before he has to host a Hitler Conference that was scheduled to be at the College-on-the-Hill.
Jack is friends with Murray Jay Siskind, who is also a professor at the College that Jack works at. Murray works in the American environment department of the school which is connected to Jack section of the school. Murray has a unique outlook on life, feeling that the minutest events that happen every day have a large amount of psychic data.
Throughout the majority of the story the main focus is surrounding the airborne toxic outbreak that engulfs the town. This event opens people's eyes to how they value life. Even when Jack thinks he has inhaled some of the toxic fumes, his goal is to find a way to extend his life. In a strange turn of events, Jack wife Babette might have had the answer all along. Through many conniving and treacherous activities, Jack has the medicine he thinks he need in order to prolong his existence. Yet come find out his very limited supply is due to his daughters worry about experimental drugs. With everyone's intense fear of death, it hard for anyone to grasp the true me
aning of life, so they can only question it.
White Noise can be categorized as one of those books that would be a classic for a long time to come. This book is mentally draining but in the best of ways. It reminds you of the life you may live or at least someone you know. Everyone has a profession in which that want to succeed in. Parents have children with their own individual quarks. No one can say that they don't have a best friend that is a little crazy in one way or another. Many people in today's society have questions about death and the purpose of life and try their hardest to prolong the life their given. Someday we may have to face an airborne toxin that threatens to take the lives of everyone, we don't know. The constant murmuring about what is to come is only noise. This very book helps to bring this book across. Yet the best part of this entire book is not in the message of life or death. The most interesting part of the book is the question "Is it raining outside?"

I've sometimes asked myself why I don't get a library card and save the money I spend buying books. This book answered that question, because the reviews and essays featured in this edition provided such insight and enlightenment that I was inspired to return to the novel again and again for a more penetrating read.

The novel itself is beautifully, brilliantly written; DeLillo is a master ironist. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the novel the first time, I highly recommend revisiting it after reading the critical essays (which were so informative that they were quite enjoyable reads themselves).

If you're going to read White Noise outside of a college class, this is the edition you should get.

In some ways, this didn't really strike me as being a novel. It seems more like a kind of schematic for analyzing the roots of the contemporary experience. Every action and thought, no matter how petty or menial is shoved through this uber-critical filter and boiled down into its constituent parts. It manages to be incredibly funny and stinging at the same time. I know a lot of people think it's dated but the dialogue still shines, and underneath it all you see a culture that with it's constant anxieties about death and the apocalypse somehow manages to be deeply entrancing in spite of how utterly facile and disgusting it can be. Kind of like with Johnathen Franzen, for whom this seems like a big influence, Delillo weaves a sort of catastrophe that we might not be looking for, but which we really want to see when we run across it

This is one of the most extravagant, original, interesting and excellent books I have ever read in my life!!!

This was my first Delillo's work and I was completely enthralled by it. His style of writing in this book is completely different from anything I have come across so far and it was really thoughts-inspiring reading.

Main themes of this book are fear of death, consumerism and relationships. It is not easy reading but believe me, every single sentence is worth of it. In this book you will go through the life of university teacher, his fourth wife and their kids. Every single character is a strong and distinctive individual with plenty of original ideas to share with readers. The family dialogues are so outstanding, atypical and interesting that they are impossible to describe. You just have to read and experience it yourself.

Delilo's White Noise is an existentialist tale about people's relationships with the media, technology, mortality and each other. It's a well written book that has some creative scenes (those in the grocery store) and characters (Murray, Wilder)that give the book depth. Delilo uses these strengths to explore his main themes.
However, I didn't think his ideas were very original, and so I only gave his book 3 stars.
Mankind's love/hate with technology was captured in Frankenstein, so it's nothing new here. The absurdist's dilemma of how to live in a godless world goes back to Camus and Dostoievski. So, while Delilo creates a novel with depth, he doesn't create a novel novel.
I think that reading the authors above would be a better way to spend your time.

The author makes some incisive, humorous, and sometimes poignant remarks about the phenomenon and idiosyncrasies of modern America. Through the main character, Jack Gladney, he comments about materialism, consumerism, the institution of marriage, mortality, and the inundation of the media on individuals.

I chuckled throughout the book. But are we really "fragile creatures surrounded by hostile facts?"

No one is tapped into the dark underside of contemporary American culture like Don Delillo is. In White Noise, Delillo explores death and humanity's fear of death in an insightful and uniquely contemporary way. This may sound boring, but Delillo is an absolutely hilarious and fascinating writer. His philosophical dialog, while utterly unrealistic, is entertaining and astonishing in its complexity of ideas and connections. It is pure pleasure to read what his characters have to say about culture and all that it implies, especially in Delillo's conception of the new forms of dying unique to our time.

I'll start with a warning. I'm not a big literary person, so maybe I'm just not sophisticated enough for this book.
It's certainly not like anything I've read before, but the message seems buried in absurd characters, weird plot developments, and constant references to pop culture. You think it must be deep and meaningful, because it's hard to understand what the point of everything is. But you have to wonder if the ideas could be expressed in a more straightforward, accessible way that would be more powerful than this story, which many times gets a bit muddled with its absurdities.
That said, I did find myself reading chapter after chapter, unable to put the book down, more out of curiosity as to what would happen next, more than anything else.
It's sort of like the bus ride I took from Houston to Columbus, OH. Interesting experience to do once, but not a second time.

Divorce, pollution, television, computers, spies, firearms, drugs, science, supermarkets, pornography, tourists and Hitler Studies. All this and more is combined in a dryly (and - darkly) funny tale of middle class dread. Jack Gladney, professor of the only Hitler Studies degree program in the world, lives with his blended family in a New England College town. The Gladney's embrace all that SHOULD be comforting about middle class life, but nothing erases their fear of death. Things get complicated after a bit of infidelity and the appearance of an experimental drug (it takes away the fear of death).
Those who either love or despise Pynchon should appreciate this startling picture of Middle American life wrapped into a tightly plotted suspense story.

White Noise is a book about an American family who has problems just like every other American family. It is about a family who has many children and each parent has been married before. I enjoyed this book a lot but I was a little disappointed with the ending. That is why I gave the book a 4 and not a five. This book kept its readers wanting more even after the story was over. It is a story about consumerism; it questions how materialistic objects can affect one's life and dealt with fears caused by the feel death caused. It talks about love affairs, fears that rule one's life and dangerous deadly events. White Noise allows you as the reader to get into the family's feelings and learn all about their attitudes their fears and their likes. Everyone has an answer or a question to answer a question in this book. There is always debate and events going on with in the family to keep the readers attention. The book could be showing how Don DeLillo looks at life. He senses emptiness and sees a lot of consumerism taking place that helps deal with the emptiness. Such as the incidents that take place in this story in the supermarket. I enjoyed how the author told the story and the events he used. Overall this book kept my interest very well and the only thing I would have changed was the ending.

DeLillo is supposed to be one of our best contemporary novelists. Alas, when I picked up this book, I found a world of Hitler obsessions, death worries, multiple divorces, sexual blackmail, and toxic waste disasters. Perhaps there is some satyrical level that I didn't get, but I couldn't identify with any of this. THe characters are two dimensional and the story is too outlandish to be taken seriously.
Is it my imagination, or are contemporary novels supposed to be bizarre? Sure, American suburbs are like an odd bubble in history, but no one I know is this crazy. This is mediocre.

White Noise is a book that will stay with you forever after you read it. It is Delillo's most engaging novel and it also happens to be incredibly funny in that in that "hey, the world is ending and there is no reason to live" kind of way.
This is a brilliant novel and should be Delillo's key to the Nobel prize, personally, I think he's overdue, but the Nobel committee likes to give the award to writers on the verge of death.

The world encapsulated in DeLillo's White Noise is a gas powered consumerist wasteland bordered on the fringes by intellectual pondering and postmodernist parallels. It is in a constant vortex, shaping and reshpaing itself against a backdrop of supermarket commoditites, media misinformations, and the filtering of the human condition through radio and television samplings. However, behind this curtain of shrink-wrapped satisfaction and pre-packaged purpose, there lies a furtive cloud of danger, always growing in malevolent proportions. A consumerist death spreads it's ameobic presence throughout the text. It is our own refuse, overt consumption, and brand name ideology that manifests itself into DeLillo's 'airborne tovic event'. From an obsession with disaster, and disaster footage, bordering on fetishism, to a toxic mass embodying our transgessions, to a drug designed specifically with the intent of eliminating the fear of death, the results of overindulgence are visible, both literally and figuratively. One of the most relevant works to date, this book defies all categorization!

Written in 1984, DeLillo's delightfully obscure novel plows through a slice of prescient postmodern America at a time when America was stubbornly modern. However, anyone born since 1970 is environmentally sophisticated enough to breeze across this tattered landscape of a book with merely a nod. One might even wonder if perhaps the book was the result of a prolonged sleep deprivation jag as nothing seems to hang together in any but the most tangential, immaterial sort of way. There are assaults on meaning and symbol, but none calculated to break through into the realm of shared consciousness or gravity.
A puzzling book, either a mild success or a grand failure, but not much else to be appreciated. Save your money for some meaningful white noise of your own and check this out from the local library, instead.

I loved the way DeLillo described scenes, although by the end of the book, this had worn into long-windedness. I did not find the book humorous; I found the idea that there might be people like this scary. At the same time, it I realized that alot of 'scary' traits were 'normal' traits that were exagerated (for effect I assume). It's an interesting peice of social commentary written in really great prose.

Imagery defeated action in this book by the score of 9 to 1. 90% of the book is like a museum exhibit with dialog. Nothing happens. Vivid imagery happens thanks to the narrator and somewhat humorous commentary happens thanks to the strange and socratic children and acquiantances, but you have to wait until the final 10% for action. It's curious because the physical action is rather compelling and very real. I don't know, 4 stars may not be enough, because I liked reading it.

I bought this album after hearing one of the songs from a movie and sampling the CD on the store. This is a great mix of electronic with an edge. If you enjoy LCD Soundsystem and other such bands, you will like this as well. Some of the standout tracks are Carbon Kid and Snow Patrol.

I love how the previous reviewer gives a bad rating because it has anti- copy technology, but makes no mention of whether the CD is good or not. How about elaborating on whether you like it or not and then warning people that it can't be copied!! Way to go Jackass!! Good way to ruin an overall rating when your rating does not even factor in the music!!

'White Noise' is one of those rare books that actually manages to cut through the clutter of American life and expose the blandness of it.

Which is why the book itself is a little bland. That's not to say it lacks in intelligence or insight or great sentence construction; it has all of those, but since it seeks to accurately portray a landscape that its author probably believes to be rather miserable, it cannot tower over it. There is little character development because Delillo probably doesn't believe that much can be developed in places like Blacksmith, middle of nowhere.

The writing, therefore, is precise and sharp, with little ornamentation. And of course, there is no plot, the addition of which, would ruin the book, whose purpose is not to have people get excited by it, but rather, become more sober, more contemplative. Unfortunately for you Stephen King lovers, this is a serious book.

However, the book could certainly have been better with the infusion of character. Delillo's aim is a political one, with the objective of examining the political and social enviornments of small cities like Blacksmith, and as such, people are often reduced to little more than messengers, their lives important in only so much as they reflect the greater happenings around them.

"White Noise" is a lesser, but smarter book than Delillo's enormous "Underworld". The latter goes off into vague, somewhat ridiculous realms, but is that much more rewarding for it. There is also substantially more time devoted to creating actual flesh and bones people, and that gives "Underworld" an almost magical feel. "White Noise", on the other hand, hovers steadfastly around one theme, and as such, can sometimes be quite monotonous.

White Noise was recently required for a class, as well as this review. I have never enjoyed manditory reading so much. I found the book to be inciteful and entertaining. DeLillo's handle of the media was creative with his use of sporadic advertising outbursts and telivision dialogue. I have already recommended this book to my friends and peers and do so to you as well.

In DeLillo's book White Noise, the ideas of death, media, society and the family are all confronted in a way I have never seen before. The author does an amazing job of showing how people react to everyday life, in a humorous and amusing way. DeLillo takes an ordinary man and knit-picks his world apart, piece by piece, in the end, creating a tale of secret, subliminalization, and astonishment. This book opened my eyes to the world around me and in effect, made me realize things about others and myself that I may have looked over in the past. The title alone makes one realize there are things happening everyday that you may not necessarily see or realize, but they are there. This book is funny and entertaining, and I would recommend it to anyone in the mood for a good laugh and an insight on life never seen before.

What more can I say? This is one of the finest examples of postmodern literature from Dellilo or any other writer. I recommend this book to students all the time--either for writers to learn from a living master or lit. students who want a brilliant take on the modern condition. It slices right to the banal heart of contemporary culture and manages to be hilarious and haunting at the same time. The critical essays are just a bonus. Most of them exceptionally well written and insightful. A great and important book.

Maybe if I'd read White Noise back when it was first published I'd have been more impressed. It's hard to remember to give credit to DeLillo in regard to his 'visionary' treatment of environmental issues when so many more horrible things have occurred since. Same thing goes for his exposee of fractured families, rampant commercialism, etc. I guess I'm saying that a great deal of White Noise's worth depended upon topicality and it's showing every one of it's seventeen years. 'Course, in another seventeen years we'll be reading White Noise for a pleasant trip to simpler times.
In the end, it's a smart book with a few good passages but I didn't like it.

This is a top release from the Alpinestars. Their first album, B.A.S.I.C set the tone for their career with a couple of strong singles. This album, however, is all killer and no filler! They revert back to the 80s sound that was so successful for bands such as New Order and Depeche Mode, and they back that up with solid vocals. A must have.

This semester, I was lucky enough to be assigned Don DeLillo's White Noise as a reading assignment for the literary theory course in which I'm enrolled. I use the word "lucky" because rarely do assigned readings turn out to be works that I would read voluntarily outside of class. White Noise is one of those rare finds.

From the first page, I was enthralled by DeLillo's superior use of the English language. I was enamored of his fresh vocabulary and witty observations. I could not help but fall in love with the narrator's life, especially his family, which was dysfunctional and quirky, yet somehow mundane and relatable. Finally, I could not put the book down, likely causing a disturbance to my roommate, who was sleeping as I punctuated each sentence with a loud guffaw, reading well into the night and well past my assigned chapters.

This book is among the most clever and thought-provoking I've ever read, and DeLillo's use of syntax is, in a word, perfection.

The book was very easy to read and understand. The main themes of the book were easy to find, you didn't have to think to hard to figure out what they were. All of the conversations that Jack and Babette had dealing with death were quite humorous to read. The book is basically about a suburban family trying to come up with ways to cure there fear of death. They do this by trying multiple products bought from the supermarket. The supermarket was used as a critcism of American society. It criticized the way that people think, as well as the way that people act. I loved reading this book and would definately recommend it to everyone.

The story starts well, with some good points, making the reader to think about the character’s obsession for the death. Jack and his wife Babette are initially well-built subjects, with interesting and even funny conversations about the meaning of life and, above all, the meaning of death. Some of their quotes are amazing and they deserve to be remembered: “The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time”.
They go through an episode of a toxic crisis in their neighbourhood that brings their obsession to the extreme. And it’s this extreme that, at the end of the book, becomes too much and not necessary. In the last 50 pages of the book, with Jack looking for that doctor who has those supposed pills that treats death fear, the reading becomes boring and difficult to believe. The main characters of the novel fall apart and it’s deceiving how a very interesting and satiric reality becomes absurd and not plausible.

Fractured families, airborne toxic events, happy pills, misinformation, existentialism in malls, and a meditation on Death -- these are just some of the themes in what's at the same time an impossibly funny novel whose relevance to our lives deepens with each step we take into the new millennium. If you can't appreciate this novel, you're blissfully lost in the system. And that's fine too.

This book was introduced a few months ago to me in an American Lit class and I've been looking for Delillo books ever since. The title points to the mass media bombardment that this family goes through as they try to live their consumer driven lives. Jack teaches Hitler Studies and as the preeminent scholar in the field (he pretty much built it as a discipline) he is haunted by his own inadequacies as both a family figure and a teacher. The fact that he doesn't know German becomes a huge insecurity.
His family is completely disfunctional--A wife that combats her own morbid fears, a daughter that searches for some way to experience things by repeatedly burning her morning toast, and a nihilist pre-pubescent son who contrives ways of disbelieving everything the family structure tells him. Delillo shows how media has become the standard by which this family lives its life through a terrible tragedy and how the community feeds off of its own fears. I love this book and have found Delillo, along with others such as Stephen Wright, to be hitting the nail directly on the head when it comes to what life has become for most people in America.

By R.Taylor (Not BLT Taylor and not a music review). My first impression of "White Noise" by Don DeLillo was that this book was scattered and going nowhere. But with an author of such acclaim, I went back and started again. This is when I saw the satire and caught its impact and the strong messages about the fear of death and the role it plays in our lives, and how we deal with, or try to avoid dealing with, the fear of death. DeLillo's message about our conventions, diversions and obsessions that we utilize as our "white noise" to deal with the daily rat race also came home with a poignant, and sometimes
comical impact. The book provided great food for thought and discussion for our monthly book club.

Much like when I read On the Road by Jack Keruac, I read 2/3 of White Noise and didn't bother finishing it. My initial thought on the author is that he is trying to be Kurt Vonnegut. Satire is a tricky genre to tackle without resorting outrageous humor and I can appreciate DeLillo's attempt. Here we are introducted to Mr. & Mrs. Gladney living what should be an idealic life, he is a professor and she a teacher and reader to the blind. What is supposed to be satiracal is that he teaches Hilter Studies and she teaches common sense stuff and read tabloid stories to the blind. Oh yeah, I sure see the witty light in this one.
Husband and wife seem to be preoccupied with the fear of death to the point of internal paraylsis. Perhaps it seeped into everything and infected those around them because none of the characters seem remotely interesting and speak in dry stale dialouge that goes on and one. I don't mind overwrought dialouges since I've read plenty of books where family conversations and arguements seem to take up entire chapters but atleast then it is full of life and vigor. Perhaps the constant fear of death have made everybody subconsious zombies.
I don't know if DeLillo is trying to be the next Vonnegut or not, but for now I'll stick to the original.

Having just finished reading White Noise and looking over some fellow reviews, I come away from the whole experience with a troubling sense of mixed emotions. As an American Literature major, I feel that American culture more than deserves to be criticized and satirized, but that doesn't mean the text doing so should be poorly-crafted. Unfortunately, Don DeLillo doesn't seem to have had much of a plot in mind when he originally sought to explore this particular subject-matter, i.e. the oversaturation of American culture, society, and identity with popular culture, mass-marketing, media, and consumption. The plot points he does include, namely the "Airborne Toxic Event" and the two-dimensional drama surrounding the fictional drug Dylar, are undeniably forced. The former is hardly anything more than a poor excuse for a plot catalyst that really has no effect on any of the characters in the text, not even Jack Gladney (who is supposedly fatally-exposed to the event's toxin). The third and final portion of the novel, appropriately titled "Dylarama" is a painfully-convoluted chronicle of Jack's delving into research involving the drug. What is arguably the "climax" of this episode - Jack's interaction with the drug's creator Mink - is completely unsatisfying. It ends with the unexpected appearance of atheist nuns who have undertaken the role of perpetuating people's need to believe that someone else out there believes in religious occurrences, beings, forces, etc. White Noise has many themes throughout, but nothing remotely religious appears until the penultimate chapter, which is jarring to say the least. And although I can appreciate what the final chapter tries to do in terms of addressing the concept of facing death instead of trying to overanalyze or repress it, it left me feeling underwhelmed.

What I have to applaud is DeLillo's inclusion of all the consumer products throughout the narrative that seemingly "interrupt" the normal flow. Although at times particular instances carry more significance than others in terms of how they relate to the "plot" directly preceding and proceeding said cultural references, the references as an amalgamated whole expertly function as a manifestation of the consumer white noise that DeLillo is attempting to satirize in the first place. Thus, natural activities like sleeping and human interaction cannot function free from intrusion. What bothers me about most of the other reviews for this book is that people are criticizing White Noise as not presenting anything novel (please take a moment to consider fully the pun). Written in 1985, DeLillo was offering dramatically progressive views on the largely-overlooked negative impacts of a growing consumer culture. Regardless of how heavy-handed his satire may be at times - and I have to agree that it is - he deserves respect.

With that said, I personally enjoy the (obvious) symbolism and extended metaphor of the supermarket, especially in terms of the effects it has on the elderly Treadwells and on the Gladneys. For the former, the supermarket functions as an overwhelming corporate entity that tries to bully them into adapting to the shifting consumer culture. For the latter, it functions as a depressingly-superficial outlet for self-expression, emulation, and self-creation.

Had DeLillo focused more on the dynamics he created within the first portion of the text, "Waves and Radiation," he could have crafted an overall better novel. Alas, we are left with the disjointed result at hand.

In any other context, his characters could undeniably be written off as poorly-characterized and flat, but I feel like their coldness, their detached natures, their general abjectness, and the lack of inspiration they generate are all more than apropos for creating a realistic and believable portrait of a middle-class American family struggling to reposition themselves in a culture and a society that is becoming more commodity-based, death-obsessed, and technologically-driven. DeLillo's lack of fine-tuned characterization is a fitting way to represent his characters' lack of their own identities. Just like the pseudo-philosophical debates about description/qualification that permeate the text, you cannot define what is either not there at all or not a constant. Again, this parallels the change the supermarket undergoes at the end of the novel: the solace it provides cannot be definitely qualifies because it depends on the caprice of the shifting corporate and consumer markets.

As a final note, despite the praise I feel White Noise more than deserves in some regards, I cannot help but feel that Don DeLillo reads like a not-so-distant predecessor for hack modern novelists like Chuck Palahniuk - a man that relies too much on pretentious witticisms, shock factor, sarcasm, pessimism, &c. I would not recommend reading Kurt Vonnegut in lieu of Don DeLillo because Vonnegut's satire is just as heavy-handed and ultimately ineffective and uninspiring. Thomas Pynchon is another author that falls into this category. His Crying of Lot 49 shares striking similarities to White Noise in that it catalogues the protagonist's obsessive search for meaning in every little thing around her just to achieve her own ends.

All in all, I'd recommend not dismissing White Noise as a dull and force-fed satire (or as a BRILLIANT reviewer described, "a lack of respect for capitalism") with an overly-simplified message. Relatedly, don't assume you're smarter than the text itself: if you were, you'd have written it first and better. Additionally, be willing to give credit where credit is due: White Noise is a decent example of an author trying to diagnose the "modern" American state.

I did not finish 'White Noise'. After about 60 or 100 pages I began hearing a little voice saying, "I think I get it". But hammering away at a not very complex point is only one of the book's annoying faults. The book makes the point that there's a lot of useless information that can take up space in our minds over and over and over. All the characters, incidentally, had virtually the same voice; the 14 year old used the same cadence and vocabulary as the college professor. The book seems to be targeted toward mental masochists that enjoy or are, perhaps, proud of the 'head-full-of-crap' condition. In this way the book is a condemnation of a certain kind of liberal arts education. If the condemnation is unintentional then I feel sorry for the author and the reader. If it is intentional - alright, already.

Turn your radio to AM and randomly switch from channel to channel. Record the snippets of call-in questions, sports reports, legal advice, and advertising slogans that follow. Read it as you would a story. It's disjointed, sure, but every once in awhile, you'll find a moment of transcendent brilliance. Like this book by Don DeLillo. He's taken nutrition labels, manufacturer specs, commercials, newscasts, popular music, history, religious polemics (I could go on) and woven his soundbytes into a story of a man and a woman who are terrified of death, a toxic cloud, speculation on the similarities between Elvis and Hitler, and ultimately, the question of meaning.

White Noise was the first DeLillo I ever tried to read, a few years ago, and I was disappointed; I thought it was thin and heartless and clever-clever. Then I got older, visited America for the first time and read it again, and suddenly it seemed true, oh so true. The book is full of dark pleasures: the family's hilariously misinformed conversations about everything under the sun; the now-classic episode of The Most Photographed Barn in America (it's not especially beautiful or old, it's just been photographed over and over again); the description of a cloud of poisonous gas as an Airborne Toxic Event; the narrator's manically argumentative son Heinrich; his daughter's mysterious utterance in her sleep of the magical words "Toyota Celica". And much, much more. The crisp beauty of DeLillo's writing can seem cold on first reading, but this is a function of the eerie ambiguity of the book's tone; it's neither satirical nor celebratory, it's just looking hard at these lives and the world around them. White Noise is, for my money, DeLillo's funniest book and his most death-haunted; that he balances the ever-present fear of death with a (for him) new compassion for his characters is maybe the most amazing thing about it. It gets better every time it's read, which is the mark of a classic.

I really enjoyed reading the novel. I thought it gave a good look into the American obsession with consumerism and death. Even though some of Delillo's ideas seemed a little far fetched it was easy to find some truth in them. Gladney's obsession with death is something that every American worries about. Maybe not to the extent that Gladney and his wife worry about it, however, still today we find ourselves trying to find ways to live a longer and healthier life. The novel gives a good look into the lives of what, on the outside, seems to be a typical American family. Bust jut like families today things aren't always as good as they seem. Overall, I thought it was a good book and would definitely reccommend it to college readers.

As far I know, and read, "White Noise" is the only novel to have parallel "Candide" in wit and humor. This novel satirizes and mocks everythings, leaving no aspect of modern life to small to get away. I see myself this novel, I see myself smart mouth kids, but with more fear of my parents. I see my family living like them....my dad going to the mall and let my sister and I loss with wallet. I must admit, see some aspect of myself I do not like at all, and "White Noise" shows it. Oh yeah, I am in college and I can see some of the professors being like J. A. K. and dorm people just as described by DeLillo.

I can't believe how many poor reviews this novel is receiving. I absolutely adore this book. I thought it was brilliant. The writing is great and the dry sense of humor kept me laughing. This was one of the few books that really made me think. I'm a literature major and there have been many times where I'll like and appreciate a book, but it doesn't mean much to me ... it's just another novel in collection. But this book was moving. It really changed my outlook and my perceptions of life. It wasn't life altering or anything ... but it definitely made me think about things I didn't think about before. Plus, it's just a great read. It's fun and flowing. I found it hard to put down. Utterly enjoyable.

White Noise was written before cellphones, laptops, and the internet became a massive part of life. Nevertheless, the book captures the already growing spirit of distraction in the modern culture as well as the inundation of information (of varying degrees of accuracy) and the hardening and disconnection with disaster. Nevertheless, the book's most consistent theme--death--is perhaps the very oldest idea behind stories as death is, arguably, the force that drives religion and all other creation myths. Despite incorporating what were, at the time, the most modern themes, White Noise is just one in an endless series of books in which a character must come to grips with the fact that humans, unlike literature, must reach an end. White Noise eventually falls victim to its own conceit; in reading a book so devoted to exploring the theme of white noise, it is impossible to escape the feeling that White Noise is itself white noise. Consider consciously listening to the gurgling of your refrigerator instead--you would probably gain the same insight in much less time.

De Lillo's White Noise is a modern classic. What I especially like about this edition (Viking Critical Library) is the extra material: articles and critical essays on the novel. Reading it was like taking a small course in cultural studies, or something... recommended!

This book was DOPE. I am usually someone who prefers literal / nonfiction styles of writing and wasn't sure I would enjoy this, but I borrowed it from a friend and couldn't put it down. Don's writing style is really unique and fun to read, and the story itself is just so creative and different from whatever is being churned out nowadays. 10/10 would read forever and ever and recommend to everyone

Reading Don DeLillo, I couldn't keep from imagining the author sitting sequestered in his home tapping out his oh-so-clever story without ever going out into the real world to find out how real people act, talk, feel, or think.
His sometimes interesting style is forced upon us at the sacrifice of real characters that through their interaction with one another actually make something happen as we look forward to in a plot-driven story. This book reads that way: way over-rated and tiresomely 'clever' after about one hundred pages. You will feel nothing for any of the characters because you will recognize that they are just sloppy cartoon sketches of contemptible middle-class American ninnies. Of course, we are supposed to identify with them because they are meant to mirror our silly and meaningless lives. (Are you tired of that angle, yet?)
In real life, (American) people may act silly, but to suggest that they are all distracted fools who don't ever pause in their stupid routines to contemplate how sad and pathetic their lives really are is truly an arrogantly sophomoric theme to carry through the length of a novel.
Honest-to-goodness laughs?: two.
New insights into life and human behavior: none
A re-tread of that other over-rated stinker "Crying of Lot 49?": Yes

Fear, misinformation, the factual errors that we live by. Mysterious forces, electronics and radiation, family dinners propelled by microwaves and news tragedy. Perception, myth, revelation, fame and false pretense. And all the while, death inching forward, minute by minute, in its digital scrawl, always oddly numbered.

Who on earth could resist taking Dylar if it existed?

To say De Lillo's White Noise is about the fear of death is a gross over-simplification. What makes White Noise a great post-modernist work is its unique and critical look at so much of what we consider the mundane realities of modern life-- technology, the media, the evolution of family structures, pop culture . . . and so on. The book is funny, sad, terrifying and dark, and will always be one of my favorites.

Neither funny nor brilliant as the reviews on the cover shout out. White Noise is essentially the work of an author who is trying to be thoughful, witty and cool; none of which you can try to be. You either are or you aren't, and as far as I can tell, DeLillo isn't. His dialogue reads like the conversations between the uber-pretentious art-punks I used to know in high school, and the characters are about as real as the art-punks' hair color. I suppose this is a good thing, as I would probably want to punch anybody that acted like these characters if I met them in the real world.
It didn't make me laugh, it didn't make me think (at least nothing outside of, "Christ, 73 more pages..."). The only reason I finished the book was so I wouldn't feel as if I had thrown away my money. Don't throw away your money, find another book instead.

DeLillo manages to capture the subtlties of modern suburbia with amazingly accurate prose and an experienced eye. Jack Gladney's world is intellectually formless on which he attempts to impose some kind of meaning, no matter the resistance he encounters (the paralyzing wit of his own children, his wife's fear of death that seems to exceed his own, his obsession with the master of death himself, Hitler, and his inability to replicate the harsh gutturalness of the German language). DeLillo's book is a work of brilliance. It left me breathless and hyper-aware of my own surroundings. It left me afraid, amused, astonished, and branded with his own signature mark.

I first read this book some time ago. I remember it as being one of the least memorable books I ever read. Friends whose opinion in these matter I value gave it very high praise. I read it again. The jokes were D.O.A., the satire limp, indeed nothing. My wife recently picked it up and struggled to finish it, it was so boring. The jury seems strongly divided on this book. Check it out at the library and test drive it, then buy if you like it.

I have no idea how everybody's receiving this one so well. I mean, Hitler Studies? I'm supposed to take this seriously? If I wasn't supposed to take it seriously on some level maybe I'd like it, but everybody wants me to take this book real seriously and I can't do it. The repetition of product names (like Velamints) is silly and adds nothing. And DeLillo doesn't bother to throw in a plot until two-thirds of the way through. I like the bantering between Heinrich and Babette and their kids but aside from that I'm not seeing the High Importance of this book. This book is like a still-life of watching television passively, so if that's what you're looking for, this is it.

I can see why this would be a big deal in the 80s and 90s, when fear of an apocalpyse was steadily creeping into our consciousness (like so much toxic gas, blah blah blah), but I really hope they'll stop making this a high-school staple from now on, because this book is not really that great.
Personally, I found the book cleverly written and occasionally amusing, but it's also tedious and often quite ANNOYING, for lack of a better word. Alright, I get it, it's "about death." Well, you could take all the best passages that banter back and forth about death and condense it into a short story. There's really no need for it to drag on like this. At one point -- you guessed it -- you start to sort of hope these people will die already so they can stop acting like such ineffectual wimps, constantly lying to themselves and others.
The dialogue is sometimes brilliant, other times completely incongruous, unbelievable, non-sequiturial. Most people don't talk like that; in this book, children, German nuns and college professors speak with the same voice.
Other than "Mink," who basically says nothing remotely non-nonsensical, the only character who doesn't sound exactly as smarmy and overly intellectual as the others is "Babette," who replies to everything with, "What is _____?" As in, "What is wet? What is dark? What is pants?" It's pretty goddamn irritating. That, and the fact that everyone calls her "Baba," made me grit my teeth in rage.
If that makes me shallow, fine. But it's something to keep in mind, if you're planning to indulge in this book: You WILL have to read about a character nicknamed "Baba," and you ARE supposed to feel some sort of affection for her. Baba.

White Noise is supposed to be a book about our relationship to death: our fear of it and our fascination with it. It is supposed to raise deep and troublesome questions. Note the keyword "supposed." It should, but doesn't.
The story, in as far as there is one, is dull and implausible. The characters are incomplete and shallow (with the exception of Heinrich, who sometimes comes alive). The dialogue is overly clever and strangely artificial. With this backdrop it should come as no surprise that the question of death is presented in a clumsy way. We never really have any reason to care about it, or the heartless creatures that so unconvincingly claim to be obsessed with it. I hate to admit it, but White Noise left me cold.
Why then three stars instead of one, you may ask? Language. DeLillo may not have a story to tell, but he tells it anyhow, and he does it so elegantly you almost let him get away with it.

I am so thankful I discovered this book 25 years after it was published. It's almost prophetic in its observations of life in the media-saturated age and the ambivalence toward chemicals that can scare and kill humanity or deliver it from depression and fear of death. It follows a few months in the life of a college professor who created the academic specialty of Hitler studies. Very few books like this are ever written. Read it as a gift to yourself and laugh. Laugh out loud, darn you!

Remember the introduction of Musak to modern life? We first got it in the grocery stores and elevators. Then when put on hold. Finally, every where and anywhere. I view this novel as a kind of background lit, whereby it resembles a novel in everyway, as Musak resembles music, but in the end there is nothing there and you have read nothing. It promies much, or I should say, the critics promise much for it, but there is very little here that hasn't been said before. Did he say it first as has been said? If so, then the fault of the book is that twenty years on, it is already dated. This is not to say there aren't clever bits. Delillo is very good on shopping life, very good indeed on tapping into the Mall culture as the core of Am life. This is a keen insight and one left virtually untouched. Amis has touched on this as have other British authors, but as far as I know no author has fully explored this. Curiously, with the increase in the number of female authors, we have had no deep explorations of shopping and its central role as depicted in Delillo's often very funny treatment. Beyond this, the piece strikes me as over-praised, a solid effort, but not a classic. The characters are wholly forgettable...that makes rereading and deep study unlikely. It's undramatizable and unfilmable. It's an example of the culture the authors most deplores; it's kleenex lit.

This book, who was recommended to me by my brother, had a very profound effect on me. It seems to open a door in your mind that you didn't realize was there. You seem more aware... as if you can 'see' (emotionally and mentally) those people around you. Plus, it's an intriguing story. It always helps if you can enjoy what you are reading...and be enlightened at the same time. Enjoy.

This book is sorely dated. What might have been hip and humorous in the 80s is sadly anachronistic today. Hitler Studies, toxic spill drills, dysfunctional families, all the devices that made this story a page turner in '85 reads like a festpool of cliches today. Nabakov's Lolita deals with similar themes but is a far superior book that is as fresh today as when it was released. Read White Noise nevertheless for what critics and audiences thought was groundbreaking stuff in the 80s.

I tried to read Underworld back when it was published, though I can't accurately recall how long ago that was, it seems like a long time. I also can't recall why I gave up on that book, but I'm quite convinced I wasn't enjoying it.

Now here I am in 2010, and decided to give Delillo another try. I chose White Noise because it's received so many awards, accolades, and inclusion in "best of the 20th century"-type lists, and the fact that it was short enough for me to digest in a few weeks.

The storyline was easy to follow. A modern family bombarded by the messages and seductions of our consumerism culture. A strange industrial accident that leads to a short period of angst. Comical exaggerated character responses to hypothetical events contrasted with relaxed responses to situations that actually occur. A strange lingering thread related to a fear of death, and a supposed pharmacological cure for such fear, interwoven with an extramarital affair and a technologically advanced drug tablet formulation system (at least for the 1980s).

I enjoyed the general sense of chaos in the plot. My frustration with this book was the lack of dedicated voice for any of the characters. Everyone spoke like a scientist/philosopher, even the children. With such a rich backdrop to work with (a college with a department dedicated to Hitler Studies) and interesting themes (dislocation of the person in modern life, paranoia, consumerism), the characters were sadly underdeveloped, as refreshing as a flat soda water thrown in one's face.

This book is more enjoyable than most of the choices you're likely to encounter at your local bookstore, but somewhat underwhelming considering the attention that's been lauded upon it. Perhaps Delillo's writing has matured since this was written, I haven't decided yet whether or not I'll find out.

I'll admit this one can drag a bit in many places, I put it on the back burner 3 times before finishing it. But once you get to the end it really does change the way you see the rest of the book and makes you want to read it again. If you meet someone who says it was pretentious ask them if they finished it. The author is clearly in on the truth about his charactors and people like them in real life.

This is a great book. .... The book is essentially about a middle-aged father of three that cannot come to terms with death. Cosumerism figures in there somewhere, but it takes a back seat to the unmistakable presence of Death. He hides behind a great many things to avoid it, butu its inevitable as he learns in the final scene of the novel, when his symbol of youth, his youngest son Wilder is nearly ran over by traffic. I would suggest the book to anyone who is looking for Thomas Pynchon lite. It touches on some of the same issues, while not bogging it down with dense language.

I understand reviewers that may have been disappointed with White Noise. For me it was a breeze of fresh air, written well and posing quirky characters and situations that were enjoyable to behold. The ending was touch and go but when it was over I felt a satifaction and regret that the book was over. I think you have to like quirk to dig White Noise.

...bit disappointed by this work from DeLillo. As a matter of fact, the only books I really like from him are Cosmopolis and The Body Artist.
Although White Noise is praised as the book that made DeLillo DeLillo, I failed to see the artistic difference from other authors' works like those of Richard Ford, John Irving or Martin Amis.

White Noise is a novel that captures a snippet of time during the 1980's when America still still struggled to find its identity when the love revolution of the 60's and 70's is gone and the technological revolution of the 1990's is still a decade away. In White Noise, DeLillo's characters are struggling with the most basic human emotion - the fear of death. From this perspective, White Noise reminds me of the inevitable consequence of choice as portrayed in Camus' The Stranger, with the difference that Camus' character accepts death as the alternative to the illusion of religion, while DeLillo's struggle to find a treatment of this innate condition.

The novel is very slow and in my opinion has too many words.
I wouldn't recommend it. Instead, try for example Independence Day or The Water Method man by Richard Ford and John Irving respectively

Probably the worst book I ever read. Oh, why you ask? Because the writing was annoying, the characters shallow, the narration pretentious. It takes more than snide comments about "life in America these days" to make a good novel. Satire is so often on a lowest level of art, because it presumes to show "us" (whoever "us" is) how shallow and absurd "our" lives are. However it completely misses the mark when the readers life is not shallow, boring or controlled by what's in the aisles of supermarkets. Social criticism in literature is so tedious and common, written so that the "intelligent observers" can have a generic laugh at "society" and feel superior. I am not impressed.

DeLillo has a genuine feel for how it is to live in America, especially the sounds & sights of contemporary life. He brings this to the reader in a lively, satirical plot that does not bore while, at the same time, ringing familiar bells in your "head" about your own experiences. I liked this the best of the DeLillo books I've read.

There is something about this book that captured my imagination so well that I could not put it down. Don DeLillo is a poet who writes in novel form and each sentence of this novel is full of meaning. The conflict in the book itself creates a constant tension much like the white noise discussed by the protagonist and his wife. Then the tension is disrupted by a series of events, leading towards the climax. This book is very much a comedy but also has splashes of drama and science fiction. It has a classic structure complete with a beginning, middle, end. There's action, interesting dialog, and even a villain.

Give this book a try, you may love it.

Don DeLillo is a fine author and "White Noise" captures his ironic tone and biting wit well. While not my favorite of his works ("Underworld" captures that prize, at least so far), I still very much enjoyed losing myself in DeLillo's lovely words and finely etched characters.

I really liked this book. I laughed out loud at parts. The constant television jingles, marketing slogans, documentary voiceovers, and feature-laden, adver-hyped, sound-bitten backdrop is a perfect description of what it "sounds like" to be immersed in our marketing culture.
This book has some truly great turns of a phrase. Delillo is a master of the "accurately absurd".

This is one of the greatest contemporary books of our time! It is brilliantly layered, with both obvious and less than obvious themes woven throughout the novel. Also, DeLillo's use of metaphor (seemingly spontaneously) is par excelence!

DeLillo is a rare sort of writer: he seemlessly blends engaging fiction, biting satire, and shrewd cultural observation in one easily readable book. In Babette, Heinrich, Murray, and especially Jack (JAK) Gladney, DeLillo has created vibrant and dynamic characters that function as realistic human beings in the framework of the plot as well as larger representations of society in a broader, cultural reading of the text. Don't come expecting an edge-of-your-seat thriller, though--DeLillo takes his time and frequently steps away from the suspense, waiting until the last moment to spring a major plot device on his audience. This has turned off a lot of readers, who cite DeLillo as boring and pretentious. This he is not; he simply isn't Grisham or Patterson. If you want an intelligent, satiric look at society told by one of America's true living masters, then this book is very highly recommended.

I have to say, I absolutely loved this book. Delillo's style, the way he writes dialogue using only the important parts of a conversation between characters, and his insight are superb. I gave the book to my boss and he absolutely hated it so I know it is possible not to like the book, but personally I don't understand it. The depiction of White Noise in America being so deafening that only the loudest of intrusions can really get through to people. A truly terrific book.

Many peole do not look at their culture and find it humorous. However, DeLillo is able to do this, and quite well. Writing about a college professor, his wonderful wife(who takes an odd turn halfway through the novel)and his many children from different marriages(some are hers too). DeLillo is able to take all of this mans' problems and laugh at them. Don't get me wrong, this is not a completely comic novel. Being able about to make light of some crazy situations though makes this novel enjoyable, and for that, I recomment it!

I won't waste time going over the plot and the book's many themes and corresponding merits; I think other reviewers have covered everything I would say. However, I was compelled to write my first the store review because I am truly perplexed by the comments that this book was difficult to get through...??? I couldn't put the book down. I didn't find it particularly challenging to read (though the multiple layers of meaning have kept me chewing on this book for months after reading it). I have never been so thrilled by a book. I felt as though DeLillo had tapped into some part of my brain to express musings I hadn't fully realized had been with me since childhood. Brilliant! Oh and did I mention that this is perhaps the funniest book ever written!

I read this in college and was simply blown-away by the ironic humor and keen (acerbic?) insight that Delillo lays down in this novel----so much so I've even gone back and read it again (something I never do). What's your take on Americana or Pop Culture in America at this time? If you're interested in the Anna Nicole Smith drama then this will be over your head. If however you think for yourself, prepare to be challenged with what Delillo throws down here. It's dense, it's relevant, it's standing up notably well over time. Isn't that what great art does?

In fifty years, White Noise by Don DeLillo will perhaps explain our almost demented times better than any other novel. The story centers around Jack Gladney, the chairman and founder of [German dictator] Studies at a rural university. He lives with his fourth wife, Babette, two children and two step-children in a labyrinth of junk hauled home from the local[store]. After a toxic waste spill in his neighborhood, Jack is overwhelmed by his fear of [end of life], one problem that no commercial product can solve --- or so he thinks. Throughout the story DeLillo shows almost frightening understanding of contemporary life. Supermarkets are churches; brand names are mantras; Elvis is worthy of academic interest; truth is buried by the endless hum of the (over)information age and the family as an institution struggles to hold on amidst the onslaught of changes, each more absurd than the last. One of the most unabashed and insightful dissections of life at the end of the twentieth century, White Noise is a masterpiece.

I enjoyed listening to Delillo's sentences. His skill with structure is almost poetic in that these sentences have flow and rhythm that a poet would love.
Having said that, I really didn't like this book. It starts out confused, and ends up confused. Delillo could have written this in a single chapter, and he wouldn't have lost anything. The fear of death, hiding from reality in the white noise, even the sexual connotations of our world, all could have been put into one short story, and it would have been interesting, besides.
The sentences have balance, flow, and beauty. The novel does not.

Beautifully written, hilarious book. Cutting insight, sharp wit, concise prose. A modern classic. Yes, it's more about details and commentary than action, but this isn't a movie, it's a book. Go see Armageddon again if you want action. But if you've got issues with the general "modern" outlook on life and are looking for some meaningful critiques, this book's for you.

This book did raise some questions for me about how a human views death, but what annoyed me about the book is that all the characters are too similar. There are not enough differences for me to read and see contrasting points. Possibly that is what DeLillo was trying to achieve, but for me it just didn't work. It made the story and plot unemotional and unmoving.

If you enjoy books where a faceful of minute observations takes the place of a plot, where the main character is a lunatic wandering around in a lunatic world, where the author is so involved in constructing some type of difficult to discover meaning that when you figure it out, you realize that his 'insight' was so inane that it wasn't really worth five minutes of effort. Yes Don, modern life is kind of odd and confusing sometimes, can we please move on. I would only recommend this book to you if you are the type of psuedo-intellectual who reads estoric books to reveal your superiority to an uncaring world, the type of person who bores others for hours about the beauty of modern art when you couldn't tell the difference between a Jackson Pollack painting and a painters dropcloth, this is the book for you. All others, you have been warned.

DeLillo's had such a wild imagination to write in 1984-85 about the reliance on pharmaceuticals to make oneself "happy", the deleterous power of mass communication on society, the delution of the family unit and the daily worry that some calamity, with the potental of causing mass destruction upon your friends and family, could just drop out of the sky - boy did DeLillo get it wrong! Thank goodness it just some half-baked attempt at fiction and not some harbinger of what could ever happen here in America. The government and society would never stand for such things.
Next he'll be writing about some kind of crazy global terrorist threat and how our constitutional rights would be methodically underminded by our government,while society, too self-absorbed watching auto racing or Entertainment Tonight, to notice or care. Gee wouldn't that be some crazy inplausable writing...eh????!!!

White Noise was an interesting book. However, I never fully understood the plot of the book. I didn't ever see any climax or anything that would grab my attention. The book was alright. I found myself falling asleep at certain points.

extremely funny and subersive. I went to the college described in the book, lived in the america described in the book, saw the barn described in the book, and my realtionship to them all was changed. Delillo may be a pathetic former hippie, but he sharpens his disappointment to a fine point here. his best book.

Starts off being funny in absurd and macabre ways with blended family, a Professor of Hitler studies and a would be Professor of Elvis and slowly transforms itself into a Kafkaesque nightmare. Much easier to read than his later novels and well worth the effort.

I wish I could have back the numerous tedious hours slogging through White Noise to the bitter, bitter end. Not since Jane Smiley's Moo has such a dull tome been written about, among other things, American academia. Little happens of note. No one cares about the cardboard characters. Someone gets shot in the belly, for no good reason. And yet this is fawned over as a comic masterpiece by, among others, The New York Times. I have been told to read White Noise before I picked up Underworld. Have no fear. I'll undergo root canal without Novocain before I try that one on for size. I've been reading nothing but plumber's trade journals and German magazines just to try to get the taste of this novel out of my mouth for the past few days. I'm thinking of getting the definitive Curious George collection just so I don't have to read any words. At least that guy in the big yellow hat knew enough to keep his mouth shut, unlike that nincompoop Jack Gladney and his boring friends. If people persist in thinking this is great literature, I suggest giving up reading altogether.

To say that Don DeLillo is pretentious is like saying that Mike Tyson is prone to anger: it's true but it doesn't really give you the full picture. Self-importance is DeLillo's defining quality and, in this sense, "White Noise" is his masterpiece. Every sentence seems unjustifiably pleased with itself; every page is dense with humorless profundity. The "Toxic Event" at the novel's heart has such an artificial, manufactured quality that it seems to arrive with the words VERY IMPORTANT SYMBOL emblazoned across it. Gore Vidal once described Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" as the perfect teacher's novel, in the sense that it was plainly written to be taught rather than read. With all due respect to Vidal, and to Pynchon's unreadable concoction, "White Noise" is a strong contender for the throne: the symbols are plentiful enough to keep any grad student busy, and, more importantly, it's impossible to imagine anyone reading this novel except under duress.

White Noise will make you laugh out loud and want to carry it around for emergency comic relief. And his sentences will make you want to memorize them so you can recite the catchier lines from memory at parties, or even on a bus.

The disturbing negative reviews found here should be taken with a grain of sand, each one, just one more in a series of "airborne toxic events", signs that Delillo is on to something very big and important like Rodin, Louis Armstrong, Jackson Pollock or The Beatles.

Let the grouches grumble among themselves, check it out at the library, and judge for yourself. Odds are you'll end up buying a copy for yourself and one for a friend before going on to read Great Jones Street, Americana and Libra by year's end.

The book White Noise was an interesting book. It was a book about a family and their problems. This family goes through a lot in the book. The father wants to be like Hitler and is learning all about him and learning how to speak German. The wife has to deal with this obession of her husband. The whole book has to deal with death. This is all the husband talks about and thinks about is dying. The couple is afraid of who will die first, either the husband or the wife. It's strange to think that is would be something a person would constantly think about and base their life around the subject. There is a big issue in the book about a drug called Dylar that the wife takes so the idea of death will fade away from her. One of the daughters finds out about the drug and tells her father. Towards the end the father wants to take the drug. This is a weird situation. In today's society people would not be taking a drug to stop thinking about death and who is going to dye first. We all know that we will eventually die, it is a part of life and living. Everyone goes through it. This is what made the book interesting. Who would have thought that their are people in this world who would base their life areound the idea of death.

"White Noise" was an interesting book because the problems that each character dealt with were not the termed "normal" problems of today's society. Most people don't have an underlying fear of death that compels them to do outrageous things. Also, not very likely will you see an entire area of a city evacuate because of a cloud. These points made the story a bit hard for me to follow because I couldn't relate to the characters. The book does however keep your attention after the first section. The book finally develops a story line to follow.

'White Noise' is hard to summarize in a brief review...it's morbid, apocalyptic, insanely funny, and beautifully strange all at once. DeLillo's characters are a compelling mix of realistic figures and philosophy-spouting plot devices, and yet they have the ability to be completely pathetic (in the 'with pathos' sense, not the 'woefully pitiable' sense). A great read.

White Noise is quite a trip, I must say. DeLillo prophetically explores consumerism, mass hysteria, TV culture, mass media manipulation, drug frenzy and postmodern paranoia all in the context of an almost sitcom like setting. It's strange to recall that this novel, which deals with so many contemporary concerns, was written more than 20 years ago. The novel itself is humorous, sarcastic, and thought-provoking, just don't read too much at once or you'll get depressed.

This book has a very humorous touch to it, while questioning our culture. The book is the story of a typical family, living in this commercialistic society. It shows that our lives' are based on what the media tells us. It's strange that a book that questions so much about the way we live can also be comedic, but it does so very nicely. Why? Because Don DeLillo is a genius. He does not act as though the concepts he writes about are very important. His humor is comparable to those of us who can't stop laughing at funerals, or roar when someone trips and falls. This book is indeed a trip!

What I loved about this book was that each page had it's own philosophical idea to present on life and presented it in a very entertaining way. For example, at one point a group of college professors are standing around asking each other questions like whether they eat their buggers or flick them. Somehow this discussion gives you the overwhelming impression of how interesting and important all the little mundane crap in life is. Even the big things like fearing death to the point of debilitating anxiety or boring things like going to the same grocery store every week are presented as their own little art pieces.

Yes, the characters do not have the depth of something from Dicken's, no the plot isn't as driven as something from, well, pick a mystery writer, BUT that's not the genius of this novel. The thing is, this book makes you THINK and I, personally, loved that.

It's hard for me to express how much I hate this book. I was forced to read this book for a college class and it made me want to strangle the author. The idea that this tripe passes for humor is an insult to the word "humor." If to you, humor means something read for the sole purpose of chuckling with other pretentious people about how funny the book was, then yes, the book has humor. If humor to you means that something is actually funny, then no, the book has no humor.

For example, the book has a guy whose wife is "afraid of death." Since everyone is afraid of death, this is a meaningless fear. Yet somehow, this drives the woman to turn to a scientist who created a pill that cures the fear of death. Shouldn't this cause the woman to go out and live a dangerous life because she no longer has a normal fear of death? No, she acts exactly the same. The price for the pills is sleeping with the scientist, so the main character finds out she's been cheating on him. He goes to kill the scientist who crawls around on the floor, popping the death-fear pills. I'm sure all of this might sound funny, but it's played completely straight so it's not.

The book is nothing more than a collection of unconnected ramblings held together by a vague plot that makes no sense. The characters function purely as symbols of things the author wants to convey, not actual human beings. The dialogue is often indistinguishable from the narration, long monologues about "clever" observations like wheat germ and relationships. Events happen but are nothing but symbols of things the author wants to express not actual events that follow cause and effect. If you were to sit in a Starbucks and debate endlessly, you might be able to come up with what the book is trying to say and I'm sure you'd nod and talk about how brilliant it is. If you just focus on a single page or paragraph, I'm sure you could find something interesting there about the use of words and phrases. If you wanted to just read the book as an actual novel, it's a complete waste of time.

I feel sorry for anyone who thinks "White Noise" is funny, because they obviously have never heard an actual joke in their entire life. Next time, try a real comedian like Dave Barry, Mark Twain or Douglas Adams.

What can I say? I don't read contemporary novels. I've been creeping toward more modern novels and had just read and was floored by Thomas Pynchon's book 'V.'. There is no basis for comparison here. White Noise does not stand up to the test of time even 20 years after it was written. Some of the concepts may have been ahead of their time, but they seem trite in retrospect. This is a light-weight throw away that has nothing important to say, although it desperately tries, about the human condition. I didn't find it particulary amusing, thought-provoking, or challenging and I didn't feel any compassion toward the main character as he spiraled toward the thinly-veiled conclusion. Better him than me.

This is one of the great surprises of 2003. I took a leap of faith and picked up this CD. I was pleasantly surprised. It's a mix of electronic music with some real instruments to keep it a tad rough around the edges. Some might hear influences of New Order or Monaco. Either way it's a great CD.
Enjoy.

This book has virtually no plot, the characterisation is almost non-existent, and it isn't funny. I bought the book because the idea of Hitler Studies was amusing, but the idea remains completely undeveloped. Maybe I missed the satire somehow, not being an American, but it seems like virtually everyone is tediously normal - apart from the fact that the children speak like adults and none of the characters are well drawn. The prose is very well constructed, but personally I like a bit of content too.
Some of the other reviewers seem to think that this tedium and pointlessness is the underlying message of the book. If I thought there were enough people like this, I'd start a restaurant selling cardboard, grilled, boiled, sauteed... I'd tell customers it was a clever satire on British food.

2 1/2

Like a mediocre combination of Air and Daft Punk, cheesy synth-lines and sometimes-catchy pop structures offer a solid but uninspiring listen. The duo's healthy variety keeps all these plain compositions afloat as a disc, but the songs up close are all shades of weak.

The only words that decribe this CD are 'simply beautiful, timeless and energetic in all the right places'. Alpinestars have since disbanded but the music lives on and the band members will be back under new guises. Go ahead and add this to your music collection, you won't regret it!

Don DeLillo's "White Noise" targets American consumerism, media dependency and the intellectuals who criticize American consumerism and media dependency. Jack, the novel's narrator, is a professor of Hitler studies at a Middle American college and falls somewhere in between the over-intellectual academics and the docile information and product gatherers. His most prominent feature is his constant fear of death. This most universal of fears expresses itself in Jack through inane conversations with his wife as to who will die first, and wildly theoretical conversations with a fellow professor.

DeLillo's caricatures of American shopping habits and university professors are even more over-drawn than the typical stereotypes. Many of the typical remedies of fear of death are offered: buying more things, accepting our limited time as a gift, taking the life of another, testing one's own mortality, investing in modern drugs, and trusting in fantastic spiritual beliefs. And each is ridiculed after cursory consideration. What stands is an ironic cynicism. DeLillo seems to be laughing at his characters and inviting readers to laugh with him. But the characters are straw man and DeLillo's humor is cheap and mean spirited.

DeLillo writes in an oftentimes frustrating post-modern style, sometimes neglecting realism or character development for the sake of his thinly veiled philosophy. I'm willing to forgive all his contrivances for the depth of his monologues, for his attention and articulation of thematics such as death, fear, masses, belief, consumerism, technology and the image. I can hear the voices of Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek in his characters and it's familiar, impressive. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and I would suggest it to anyone interested in the philosophy of image especially.

Full-length reviews of mine can be found at LitBeetle.com.

Read all the bad reviews of this book. Each is from a person who wants a straightforward A-Team type plot. If you want that, go read Tom Clancy. If you want a powerful, brilliant, funny book read this.

The protagonist is a professor who intellectualizes his family, his career, and his experiences into existential angst, like a college sophomore strung out on Sartre and Camus. Characters talk alike, and the plot reminds me of static between radio channels. If this is satire, it rings hollow.
The protagonist's father-in-law, the most lively character, makes a brief appearance, delivers snappy parting lines, and disappears forever. The book gets two stars because of that character and because the descriptions are good.
Spare me another "modern" novel like this, limp in spirit, vapid in plot, short on progress toward meaningful resolution.

I picked up "White Noise" with eager anticipation. I've heard Don DeLillo's praises sang loudly from many prestigious sources (the New York Times among them), so I was anxious to give him a try myself. I must say that I am disappointed. "White Noise" has done what no other book has achieved in a long time: it thoroughly aggravated me. It reads like a philosophical treatise disguised as a novel where the author clearly didn't care enough about the novel-ish aspects to flesh them out at all. There's a fake-out premise about a billowing black cloud (or "airborne toxic event" as DeLillo grandly calls it) that leads nowhere except to give the people who populate DeLillo's novel something to muse on for the rest of the book. The characters are uniformly annoying, and while they all have characteristics that make them initially intriguing DeLillo manages to squash any interest you may have had in them by refusing to give any dimension to them. The narrator, Jack Gladney, has earned renown as a professor of Hitler studies; his fourth wife Babette teaches classes on posture and eating techniques; son Heinrich is a moody junior philosopher who takes everything literally and figuratively at the same time; colleague Murray hangs out in the grocery store to watch people eagerly consume products; and more. It sounds interesting (hey, it sounds like a Kurt Vonnegut novel -- and, come to think of it, I'd rather read his spin on these characters any day), but DeLillo isn't really interested in them as people. He only presents them as allegories there to spout philosophical dialogue back and forth. Said dialogue is occasionally interesting and sometimes ground-breaking but becomes too tiresome and heavy, and all too often it feels that DeLillo is straining way too hard to make a point that was specious in the first place. Characters are constantly clamoring for definitions in conversations that come off just as irritating as Bill Clinton asking what your definition of "is" is. All this talk, and what is DeLillo ultimately saying? Another reviewer called this a "stubborn, perplexing" book, and I heartily agree. As I said earlier, there are moments where the fog clears and DeLillo makes a good point (pages 147-149 and 317-320 come to mind) but all too often it just feels like he's arguing for argument's sake. Philosophical novels with allegorical characters have been done much better in my opinion -- see "The Lord of the Flies" or "Animal Farm" for examples -- and with far less infuriating results.

Well 't is not exactly a book ' would at a bookstore but i needed it for my BA english degree. I could easily say ' was suprised, because once you start to read in between the lines, the book is really good. It criticizes technology in an objective way. It talks about
human nature, fear of death, and actually makes you start thinking about it. I think it even is more affective today because we accept all those technology etc. as a normal part of our lives and 'ndeed it is the same in the novel. There are ways in which it is beneficial and ways in which it is harmful. The book is realistic, there Are no highly dramatic moments. 'mportant conversations happen in the car, just like normal life. It is a postmodern literature.
'f you enjoy reading that would also make you think about reality etc. Then this is a good book.

I read this book almost 10 years ago. It is a poignant and succinct view of the problems we face as an American society that cannot be solved by simply blaming our government for [enter your cause here]. I am amazed how accurately Mr. DeLillo captured the feeling of our world post 9/11. I look forward to reading it again and again.

Although one would not know it from this book, words do have meanings and must be selected with at least minimal care. With no plot, no character development and no discernable raison d'etre, this book would probably not make it past a college level creative writing seminar. Don't waste your money buying it or your time reading it; there are too many other good books that deserve both.

Funny? Maybe for about a chapter and a half. This book is a monotonic bore. The prose is lackluster, the characterizations cartoonish, the so-called portrayal of the absurdity of modern life (there's a new concept!!!) obvious at best. I could not have cared less about anyone in this over-rated piece of junk. A complete waste of time.

Delilo deserves his praise. Reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut. Growing up in the mid west in the nineteen eighties, this book is essential in my opinion. I read this at a leisurely pace, and found myself smiling periodically throughout the entire novel. The dialogue is priceless, the character development is also genius. Reminds of me Chabon (I happened to read him first) and a bit of Franzen. I believe Delilo to be be a key author in the development of post war American fiction.

Unless you want to read about a melodramatic middle aged man and his obsession with death, I would pass. The novel is slow to develop a plot, which makes it unengaging and had to get into. I can appreciate some of Delillo's sarcasm, but overall the novel (to me) was not worth reading. Just a lot of moments where scenes dragged on or didn't seem to be necessary for the novel.

Wow, talk about missing out on a great book. Beth (a reviewer below) quotes one of the great postmodernist scenes in this novel. The questions of truth and reality are grappled with in an amazing conversation between Gladney and his 14-yr old son. It's really a shame that Beth missed out on this great scene. My guess is that she also thought "The Most Photographed Barn" was a waste of time as well. It's true that this book might be tough to get through but it is well worth it for its comments on American society and the family as a nuclear unit.

The central character, Jack Gladney, is an academic and an authority on Hitler who has trouble speaking German. He and his wife, Babette, have several children, residue of their past marriages to others. All of the children, however young, talk the same as all of the adults, however old.
There is, in other words, no individuality in the dialogue.
A toxic cloud enveloped part of the imaginary village where Jack and Babette live, but I didn't care, because there are no engaging characters in the book....END

DeLillo's grasp on American culture is impressive. In what begins as a light, entertaining novel about a modern American family attracted to television, disaster, and shopping, materializes a dark theme that isn't often addressed- the fear of death. This is the white noise that everyone hears, but wishes to disregard. This bold work could be considered a postmodern masterpiece.

i just finished reading white noise by don delillo. this is the first book by delillo that i have read, and i really wasn't dissappointed. as far as entertainment goes, delillo does and awesome job. he managed to fit an airborn toxic event, crazy scientists, love affairs, attempted murder and more into this novel and it works. as far as theme goes, he did a fine job as well. he maintains his messages throughout the entirety of the novel and sticks a quirky character, murray, in to clarify for us. it was definately worth the read.

For years I heard what a wonderful book this is. Finally I bought it to read. And read, and read, and read, even though my wife, a brilliant engineer said she hated it when she read it ten years ago and that I was wasting my time. It took me a month to finish, and every night it put me to sleep after about three pages. The Hitler studies concept was brilliant (except Mel Brooks had already done it) and there were indeed some amusing parts, but pretentious does not begin to describe this book. Thank God for... readers because I thought surely something is wrong with me if I'm the only person in the world except for my wife who doesn't like this book. Then I found out I wasn't alone--there are a lot of us on the sidewalk who see that this emperor isn't wearing any clothes. Not only that, he's butt ugly besides. I absoulely recommend this book. You will, like many, either love it and join the cult, or like many of the rest of us, be utterly amused that so little can be taken for so much by so many. One way or another, you are going to feel good about yourself, and so much smarter. In my case, I decided I am much too smart for this book. Definitely decide for yourself; it's a litmus test of intelligence, and you can't fail.

My edition of White Noise is packaged in Penguin's "Great Books of the 20th Century" series. While the moniker is an interesting marketing tool, it's not an accurate one. The novel certainly resonates in places: it's richly ironic, it expresses many of our cultural fears, on occasion it's humorous. As a cultural critique, it was ahead of it's time--Douglas Copeland, for one, in Generation X, makes a similar critique; DeLillo, of course, preceded him. But, in the end--what a bore. The prose is indulgent--to wit: "We went our separate ways into the store's deep interior. A great echoing din, as of the extinction of a species of beast, filled the vast space." The prose is purple: "The time of the spiders arrived. Spiders in high corners of rooms. Cocoons wrapped in spiderwork. Silvery dancing strands that seemed the pure play of light, light as evanescent news, ideas borne on light." Yikes. After 300 pages, I felt so exhausted. The novel is so unrelenting--it drums on and on to its inevitable conclusion--with neither surprise, revelation or even a nuance. I felt rather robbed of the time I'd spent reading it.

This book was assigned reading for my contemporary American literature class. My instructor and most of my classmates raved and said how great Delillo is, calling him a genius. I could not disgree more. First of all, his style of writing and utterly pessimistic world views are not my cup of tea, therefore alienating me from the get go. Even worse, nothing he wrote was new to me. None of his ideas were original. If an author has nothing new to tell me & writes in a stlye that doesn't appeal to me, then I feel that book is a waste of my time (and money). Why the critics embrace Delillo is beyond me. I guess some writers are just en vogue and become very overrated in certain periods, much like Hemingway or S. King. I'd avoid this if I were you and read something by Vonnegut or T. C. Boyle. If this is considered the "cream of the crop" of American contemporay literature, we might as well watch T.V.

I love the music on this CD.

Sadly, after trying for some time to figure out why it wouldn't play on my computer, I discoverd the sad truth: It's a broken CD. In tiny writing around the outside of the CD: "This CD incorporates anti copy technology!"

Don't buy it if you care to actually play it.

However, I discovered that it was more like second-rate J.G. Ballard crossed with The Simpsons, with a little bit of Barthelme and Vonnegut mixed in. In other words, I was disappointed. If your expectations aren't too high, it's actually not bad. It's an amusing diversion. But it's not the greatest American novel of the 80s as some people have proclaimed.

The book is mostly just a funny look at ourselves as American, family-oriented suburban dwellers. Will deliver many a laugh, but it also deals with some complex issues.

Through the medium of the main character's reactions to certain events, the book manages to deal with postmodernism, absurdism, religion, existentialism, among other philosophies. The satire never stops from start to finish, and through this, Delillo masterfully deals with the constituent ideas of the aforementioned philosophies: positive and negative ideas of freedom, the meaning of life, life after death, atheism.

this is a great book to bounce off of. it teaches always to leaven your discourse with a dose of humor, because otherwise reading it would feel like quite a slog. the size is impressive. for what it's worth, it's an important stepping point in american lit.

White Noise makes for an amazing read if you don't need a strongly linked plot or thrive on coherence. I think the problem a lot of readers would have with this book is the complete lack of any real conflict other than the fear of death. However, the gripping aspect of this book -- the part that really lasts -- is the underlying theme that all events in our lives easily transform into nothing but white noise, as the title suggests.

Delillo is actually a fairly crummy writer. Presumably he is going for the Pynchon-esque feel. It doesn't work (it arguably doesn't work most of the time for Pynchon either, but he's certainly more talented as a writer). His prose is atrocious. I have read pulp which does better. The characterization is below cartoonish. I read a book where the main character's name was "Hiro Protagonist" which had substantially more sophisticated characterization. I read some art critic excuse that he made his characters this cartoonish on purpose. I doubt that, having read some of his other work (also full of cartoon characters), though it does end up working in this one, rather as it would in a John Irving book.

The ideas behind the book, on the other hand, are somewhat worthwhile. The mass hysteric transmission of disease symptoms and anomie is worth thinking about. Though I wonder if his thoughts on the matter are worth thinking about. He also delves into the pointlessness and soullessness of modern suburban existence. Rather old hat if you've seen Fight Club, but he was probably one of the early writers to convey this in any detail. All in all, I don't see what the fuss is all about; he didn't do anything that Philip K. Dick didn't do better a decade earlier. Not bad casual reading though. I figure it's probably one of them books that the faux intellectuals like to reference as it's "hip" and easy to read.

I am beginning to wonder if the babyboomer generation has equated pith and slick irony as intelligence. White Noise is a book austensibly about death, the meaning of life and the frivolousness of consumerism.

Mr. DeLillo has created a small world where moderately interesting people take great pains to be clever, bathed in non-sequitors and absorbed in seemingly silly arguments. I will say, however, for every 5 ridiculous conversations played out, there is one that contains the germ of an interesting thought or concept. When Jack and Murray have a discussion about death, rage, meaning and the reaching of conclusions based on honest reflection, the insight and complexity of the books' intent come to the fore.

I wish there was more depth, less faux tongue-in-cheek patter in this work.

My first exposure to this book came a few months ago when I noticed a hearty recommendation at a website I frequent. The book description sounded promising: written in the mid-80s, a critique of contemporary American life, "Hitler Studies," etc. I excitedly picked the book up but felt a bit disappointed from the get-go, as the writing style/narration is very cold and detached. This novel failed to engage me from the start, yet I plodded onward, determined to finish it. In the end I felt cheated, let down. I understand that this is a work of satire, yet it still rings hollow and cheap. I did not find it funny overall (even though the Hitler/Elvis Studies bit was undeniably clever), and the overarching pessimism and misery contained therein grew tiresome fast. I get it--the main characters have a paralyzing fear of death that prevents them from actually living. Ha ha. DeLillo's satire was a touch too mean-spirited for my tastes. He examines some of humanity's methods for dealing with our collective fear of mortality and then utterly demolishes them all in an attempt to be clever. And surely he could have devised a more effective satirical look at rampant consumerism than setting every other chapter in a supermarket.

What bothered me most about the novel, though, was the characterization. With few exceptions, every single character in this novel is almost exactly the same and contains almost no individual distinctions. You have Babette, who is poorly developed and nearly echoes the protagonist's every word. The only things that distinguish Murray Siskind from Jack Gladney are contrivances, such as the former being Jewish and a university transplant. There is the eleven-year-old girl who talks like a highly intelligent adult, the nine-year-old girl who is also unrealistically precocious, and then you have the fourteen-year-old boy who speaks like an absolute genius. The only truly interesting character in the entire novel is six-year-old Wilder, who seems retarded and/or autistic, yet none of the other characters seem to notice or care. I felt extremely let down by this highly acclaimed novel. Unless you enjoy being aggravated and annoyed by terrible characterization and an overly bleak view of modern life, I can't recommend it.

I thought the book was good. Had a good plot, good imagery and good metaphors. Some of the characters seemed far fetched such as the 9th grader Heirich who knew too much. No one that age is that interested in the things he brings up. And the parent- child relationships lacked discipline. Other than this, the book was alright. I gave it only 4 stars because I wouldn't read it again.

The book was an excellent satire on many of society's stereotypes and conceptions. The way the author handles death in a nonchalant and almost satirical way is brilliant. The issues and wordplay are tremendous as a book about basically nothing is transformed into a great work.

I kept seeing this book appear on lists showing great books that everyone should read. This book has been such a dissapointment. There is little in the way of character development, and the plot is flat and pointless. I love books and love to read but the hours spent with this story were pointless.

I liked this book and I found it to be a fun read despite the postmodern elements to it. There are some scenes that will just stay with you and there are some lines that I still find myself repeating some... let's see... 9 years after I read it. So, I think it's a worthwhile read although it is somewhat academic.

I had great expectations for this book, and based on the first hundred pgs i thought it would be a classic. But the plot gets lost and over-reaches in it's twists, turns, and subject matter that it attempt to take on. I would still recommend it, but don't go into it with the expectations that the publisher's "(Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)" might imply.

I intensely hated this book when I started reading it because the narration seems so psuedo-intellectual. It wasn't just the narrator, it was all the characters, even a guy carrying a television feels like he needs to enhance every half-sentence with a wistful analysis and a depressing flourish. I thought the author was a snob for inferring that his descriptions were the truth and battering his reader with blatantly theme-driven elements. But then when I discussed the book in class (I read it for school) a whole world of analysis opened itself up and we could explore all the little nooks of the novel's structure and symbolism. It was fun and interesting. We even decided on a literary purpose behind Jack's information obsessive family life and all those details. But outside of class, when I went back to reading the book, the narration still irked me too much to enjoy the plot or the characters and the theme was not only depressing but admitted its own pointlessness. Yes the book is highly relevant but I already know enough about its themes to want to stop dwelling on it. Intentionally dead characters living in exaggerated, modern isolation, EAghhhh.....

This book provides a critical look at the world of postmodern culture. It gives perspective which is not easy to find and also provides a critique in non-academic language, a helpful addition to any library.

I'd tried to read White Noise a number of times, thrown it across the room each time. But this time, with a couple of transatlantic plane flights in my arsenal, I couldn't fail to finish, right?

Wrong. White Noise is terrible. It's full of dialogue that no one would ever say, precious, precious, gimicky, and gimicky. Every word is too clever by half, including "and" and "the." I take it the grating serial monologs making fun of consumerism (oooh - how unprecedented!) are meant to emphasize the disconnectedness of modern life. But instead they show only the consequences of writing an arid echo chamber of a piece drained entirely of humanity or anything remotely resembling any claim at accuracy. It is, however, tremendously effective at annoying its readers.

Fear not DeLillo haters. This will be off the syllabi before too long. And how we will celebrate!

A modern American classic by one of the great American writers. DeLillo is funny, he's witty, and his writing speaks volumes about the modern American condition. Interesting presentations of post modern men and women. This one belongs on your shelf.

A decent story with no endings. DeLillo's style is uninspiring and uninfluencial. This book probably should be read but just not re-read. I would recommened something with more emotion like Marquez or Roy.

I found Delillo's incredible amounts of cynicism,pessimism,self doubt,and wholesale use of argumentative encounters to be at best boring and at worst annoying. If I ran into the main character in the street I wouldn't like him and if this is truly a microcosm of life in the states [which its not] then I'd move.

White Noise by Don DeLillo is set in a small town called Blacksmith, somewhere in Middle America in the 1970's. The setting seems to be deliberately bland to allow the reader to conceptualize it as "Anytown, USA". The book centers on Jack Gladney as he interacts with his family, friends and coworkers. In the story, an airborne toxic cloud strikes Blacksmith. The town residents, including the Gladney family, evacuate to a shelter. Everyone is eventually permitted to return to their homes. Jack's wife takes an experimental drug and has a physical relationship with a "Mr. Grey" whose identity is eventually discovered by Jack, who shoots him.
The main character, Jack Gladney, is a middle-aged liberal arts instructor, chairman of the Hitler Studies department, friend, colleague, father, husband, and three-time divorcé. His wife Babette is a poorly developed character but we do gather that she reads tabloids to old people, takes experimental drugs, cheats on her husband and has ambitions to die before him.
The children are byproducts of the various current and previous liaisons of Jack and Babette. The girls seem to be obsessed with developing every symptom that radio and television reports say people are supposed to have if they've been exposed to the airborne toxic cloud.
Murray Siskind is a professor at the college and a close associate of Jack's. He wants to replicate Jack's Hitler Studies success by building a similar career teaching Elvis Presley Studies. Jack attempts to help Murray in this endeavor by co-presenting with him and drawing comparisons between Adolf Hitler and Elvis Presley. Murray is fascinated with the minutia of human behavior and makes unique observations throughout the book.

The story is populated with several other minor characters but only a few are worth mentioning. Howard Dunlop is an older and presumably German man who attempts to teach Jack to speak German fluently. Vernon Dickey is Babette's father. He is relevant to the story for two reasons: at one point Jack confuses him with Death; later, Vernon gives Jack a gun. The final character worth mentioning is Mr. Gray, a.k.a. Dr. Willie Minks. Minks allows Babette to trade sexual favors for an unauthorized supply of an experimental drug called Dylar, which is supposed to eliminate the fear of death.
After the toxic event, the theme of death is explored as the characters interact with each other. Jack's constant fear of death continues to escalate. The book progresses toward the climactic event of Jack discovering the identity of Mr. Gray, confronting him, and shooting him. From this point, the book winds down. Jack takes Mr. Grey to the hospital and both men survive.
The theme or point of DeLillo's story seems to be that triviality, commercialism and materialism in American culture cause a lack of meaning, truth, and spirituality resulting in a propensity to fear death. His writing style relies on cliché's, stereotypes and satire to expose the superficiality and commodification of American culture. Humor and extreme examples are used throughout the story. The book often reveals ironies present in everyday life and culture in America. Repetitive lists are regularly used as a device to create a mood, make a point, or reveal the absurdity of something. The voices of the characters all sound the same, even the children.
I read this book in a college class. When I first heard that we were going to read a novel as part of our assignment, I was delighted. Compared to academic textbooks, novels are generally much more entertaining, interesting and easier to read. The book's back cover described a plot that included Hitler Studies and an airborne toxic event. I've studied and read extensively on the lives of Adolf Hitler and Elvis Presley. I was therefore intrigued with and supportive of the plot-concept of having a dedicated educational program focused on their lives. I also believe that one grave and growing threat to mankind's existence is a toxic event or a super-virus. So far, the book sounded good.

Unfortunately, it didn't take long for me to remember the old cliché "never judge a book by its cover". After such promise, the author squanders the most interesting plot elements and instead chooses to focus on the banal. His characters are uninteresting and difficult to differentiate or relate to. His writing style is pedantic, dull, unimaginative, humorless and irritating. The situations he describes are implausible. The dialog borders on being ludicrous. His obsession with the theme of death and his lack of respect for capitalism is exceeded only by his offensive comparison of Elvis Presley to Adolf Hitler. In the end though, it is the reader who is disrespected the most. I remain a stalwart supporter of freedom of speech but after reading White Noise I have a new understanding of why some people burn books. I would oppose burning this book though; since it is made of paper, the environment has been harmed enough through the callous waste of good trees.

This book was amazing. I'm only giving it 4 out of five stars because you need to be a fairly well read, a very literate person to understand and read, to truly enjoy the genius that Delillo portrays. It was wonderful. I found myself sad at parts, shocked at others, but mostly just incredibly interested at how Delillo is able to grab that part of life that we all see but don't acknowledge.

The author is so caught up saying something about modern society, he forgets that he is telling a story. The characters are weak and poorly written. The plot is so thin, I could see through the pages.
A theme from this book is the placebo effect, but I think its ironic that this very book has its own placebo effect. Some people seem to actually trick themselves into thinking there is a story that is worth telling in this book. To these people I would say, "I have some sugar pills that cure whatever ails you." The fact is there was no story at all.

It was evident that Don Delillo is a very smart and observant man, and his writing is undoubtedly first class. The novel White Noise and a satire about consumerism and every passage and paragraph is booming with it. However, this does not make an entertaining read.
I have to read the novel for a college class, and I love to read. But I couldn't handle this book. From the first chapter it already showed how much of a frustration it was going to be. The story seems to go nowhere as it was lost between the tiring dialogues and descriptions. Every time a character speaks, he/she will spill out some philosophical BS that offered more of Mr Delillo's observation rather than progressing the story itself. The story itself is not anything impressive, and the only way you can identify to a character is that if you can endure and agree to whatever BS every character spews out. Imagine reading an article about consumerism, this is what White Noise is except that it's 310 pages long.
A very frustrating novel that could be considered a torture or a test of patience to read if you have to do it for a college class.

Perhaps this book was a bit over my head - but I doubt it.

This book seems to have been written solely for the purpose of analysis and academic hair-splitting. The symbolism, repeated phrases and scenerios and borrowed philosophic concepts in this book are tired and overly obvious, mainly revolving around the theme that postmodern America is brainwashed by a bombardment of advertisements and the media, creating some sort of collective consciousness that causes the characters of the novel to constantly mimic what they hear and see on TV. At points in the book, Delillo will randomly start listing brands - "Mastercard, American Express, Discover" - in the most obnoxious, self-satisfied way, as if sneering at Americans for being controlled by our money. American life is depicted as depthless and empty, a culture whose avant-garde consists of radio slogans, consumerism, capitalism, mindlessness and the emotions dictated to them by the television.

While not entirely accurate, this isn't the main reason why this book sucks. Delillo is so pretentious with this book, acting as if he is making some poignant, brilliant connection between postmodern capitalism and how it effects society - as if no one has made these connections before. This book was written in 1985, and I must give it credit for making these connections between the media, technology and our culture prior to the point where our information-overloaded society began to reach it'ss peak, but it is such a common theme in literature now and has lost a lot of its ingenuity and interest. In fact, I doubt that this book will be considered a classic for long for this very same reason - Delillo's story has been told and retold so many times and in better ways that there is no point in reading this book.

Instead, read Jean Baudrilliard's "Simulacrum and Simulation," a philisophic treatise that is the basis of this entire novel. Delillo pretty much borrows every concept for his book from Baudrilliard. If you want all the concepts and theories without the unlikable characters and boring plot line, then read Baudrilliard's essay and save yourself 200 pages of nonsense.

I'd have to say that the worst aspect of this book isn't the boring plot line, the pretentiousness or the borrowed concepts from Baudrilliard. The worst aspect of this book is the annoying characters. Another theme of this book is fear of death, a fear the main character Jack is obsessed by, and how this primal instinct has become separated from our lives by a mindset that technology and man can control nature.

The characters of Jack and Babette, a married couple, are pathetic - they are cowards who have no reason to feel unsafe in any sense of the word, who are nonetheless engulfed by an ilogical and self-obsessed fear of death. Babette is so pathetic in her cowardice that she sells her body to an old scientist who is working on a (bogus) medicine that will ward off the fear of death.

Jack, an intellectual fraud who founded the ridiculous "Hitler Studies" department of his college, hides behind the modern icon Hitler as a means to cope with his fear of death. Jack has no interest in Hitler in a historical or political sense - he speaks no German, which is ridiculous for someone who starts a department called Hitler Studies - and would rather examine Hitler as a celebrity icon, whom he compares to Elvis.

I'd like to liken Jack's academic dishonesty to Delillo's borrowed concepts cast in a badly narrated plotline - nothing "classic" or new in this novel, just a lot of hogwash philosophical concepts hidden behind a terribly written story.

Don de Lillo's 'White Noise'! Wow! Thanks daughter I've heard so much about it, this grand ironic, sardonic expose of modern America... Can't wait to read it.

OMG! What a disappointment!

Must be careful: Laws of libel etc. and accusing practically the entire American Literary world of having lost their senses. Time magazine had it in its top 100 of the century!
Beg to differ: To call it a novel is to insult hundreds if not thousands of average authors who at least had something worthwhile to say never mind the gross absurdity of mentioning 'noise' in the same century as Hemingway, Vidal, Greene, Jones, Roth, Lawrence etc.

E.g. Almost every review mentions the importance of 'Murray' who gets involved in philosophically deep yet quirky (funny?) dialogues with the main character Jack Gladney - - Except 'Murray' does no such thing - - no, when you take a careful look 'Murray' has only 3 scenes of any importance with Jack & none are deep and barely humorous!
E.g. Jack finds his 4th wife Babette has been cheating on him - - well, that much is in the story - - only she's cheated to get a failed drug that isn't officially approved - - which Babette would've surely known from only the most cursory of checks of any reputable pharmaceutical register and as it was supposed to cure 'fear of of death' you'd think the lady would have made that much of an effort before letting a dud scientist have his way!
E.g. Jack's son is allegedly pointing out absurdities of modern America, but his own behaviour is the only absurdity of note!
E.g. There's Jack confronting the pseudo-scientist who's had Babette - - this is Jack the alleged deep-thinker, the alleged mortally afraid of death, the wronged husband - - except by the closing pages of the story no one in their right mind could possibly care about mind-numbingly tedious Jack's unbelievably implausible non-confrontation with the cad!

No, sorry America, but from page 1 onward the utterly innocuous, vacuous characters and their inane conversations and trivial activities is a very long bore.
Frankly if this is as some critics allege de Lillo's "breakout novel" then a swift return to wherever is this reader's recommendation.

Delillo's disese has been spreading ever since this novel was published. The redundent fragments, the uncomphrehensable descriptions, and the false meaning that is being controlled by his illiterate notions of the dreaded "conspiracy".
Delillo's attempt to debase literature and humanity is praised which makes it that much more ironic and ultimatley a pathedic sign of the power of publicity.

If I could give it a negative 5 stars I would gladly do that. The worst book I ever HAD to read in my entire life. Tbh, I feel like a college professor must've known him and read how awful this book was and was like I'll assign it as a reading assignment to help the guy out, so people have to buy the book. The people that gave it a 5 star? Who ARE these people? I hope I never meet one of them. I am in love with writing and reading, but this was like having to pull out my OWN teeth to read one page after the other. A book on nothing, characters were non-existent, this book had no LIFE whatsoever.

This book was amazing, for those of you who get it, awesome, all of us think on the same level, for those who dont, the problem might be that you are too caught up in the pop-culture that this book talks about so much to even realize that this book is a slap in the face to you. Maybe you should let go of these "truths" about life that you have come to believe over time and realize that there is more, stop being so closed-minded. I think that DeLillo has brought the ugly truths about our society into the spotlight and some of you just can't deal with it. Don't get mad at the book, some parts may be redundant, but listen to how you hold a conversation sometime? I'm willing to bet that you will be shocked when you hear something that sounds a lot like conversations from the book...

It is rare that I have a reaction of violent dislike to a book, and even books that I do not especially like I can find something respectable or interesting about the text, but I hate this book. This is the sort of literature that gets first-year philosophy majors to cream themselves because it is oh-so-insightful and important, and allows all the armchair intellectuals of the world to feel a little bit more superior because they assume the cleverness of Delillo's writing is lost on lesser minds. This isn't a novel, it's an extended postmodern manifesto that exposes the philosophy for the empty, whiny system of nihilism that it is. This novel has no characters, only insufferable stereotypes who can't walk through a produce isle at the grocery store without disappearing up their butts with lengthy, obnoxious monologues that somehow equate buying apples with death (exemplified by the single most unbearable character I have ever come across, Murray); it doesn't have drama, only histrionics. What makes this a thoroughly unenjoyable and ultimately uninteresting is that it is a work that sags under the weight of its own importance; it is so persistently self-conscious that I can't take it seriously as a work of literature--it spends a couple hundred pages trying to convince me how great it is without actually being great. What's more, if this novel were a failure as a novel but still offered some genuine insight into the experience of the individual in a post-modern world, it would still succeed as a work of philosophy. But it doesn't; every sentence feels like a catch-phrase rather than a substantive statement.
The difficult thing about criticizing a novel like this is that defenses of it are always predicated on the notion that disliking it reflects a misunderstanding of postmodernism itself--that is, those who dislike this novel obviously are not sophisticated enough to untangle the dense threads of philosophic intent that make it what it is. But, I do understand postmodernism (don't like it but still understand it) and still feel this is a failure. While reading it I was reminded of the infinitely superior Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut), and thought that this is what that great work would read like if stripped of all its originality and craft. That is a successful postmodern novel; this one is several long hours of my life I will never get back.

it's just a boring, out of date, and irrelevant riff on Baudrillard. Short summaries of this novel are actually far more fun to read than the novel itself. I might recommend this book to young highschoolers, but to anyone else this is just so transparent and... yawn, even writing about this is dull

Does anyone read Celine? Talk about Hitler studies...

I had to read this book for a course on 20th century novels. I found it to be mostly plotless and nearly a complete waste of time to read. If the author hadn't been praised in the past for other novels he'd written perhaps I wouldn't have been assigned this and my time would have been better spent on a more worthwhile text. The book was unrealistic as well, if it was trying to make a point about the real world I didn't get it. Thank you for your time.

Alright...So here's the deal: America is just a nation of lazy, stupid people who like to buy stuff and listen to whatever the media tells them.

I've just summed up about 11,217 novels that have been written in the last ten years, and DeLillo's "White Noise" is yet another one. It doesn't tell us anything new ("new" being the etymological namesake of "novel"). It doesn't open our eyes to a different reality. It just whines and complains and, like many other novels EXACTLY like it, "White Noise" occassionally tries really hard to be funny.

I suspect that most of the people who actually like this book DO like it because in reading it, they feel like they're reading something "intelligent." And to read something intelligent supposedly makes the READER intelligent, right? So who doesn't like to feel smart?

What happened to just telling a new story and telling it well? Apparently Don DeLillo never took that particular writing workshop, because he was too busy taking the ones on postmodernism, consumerism, feminism, communism, and any other -ism that supposedly leads to good literature.

You can go ahead and read this book. Or you could just walk into Barnes & Noble, close your eyes, and throw a dart at random. Chances are it'll land on yet another "intelligent" novel just like this one. Or, if you're really an intelligent reader, you'll ignore it altogether and sit down with a copy of "The Grapes of Wrath" and read a truly good book.

I read an article comparing Don Delillo and Chuck Palahniuk's writing style. What an awful comparision. I have read two Delillo books and both have been dreadfully boring.

In White Noise the characters are annoying and the conversations are awful. The book seems to have very little purpose and goes no where. If this is one of the great books of the 80's, I will not be reading any more books from the 80's.

First off, I don't understand why so many people think this book is that good. It was recommended to me that I read this list of books to prepare me for college courses I'm taking; White Noise was one of them.

From reading all the positive reviews, I thought it was going to be enjoyable. How wrong I was. Even in the beginning there were these redundant conversations, such as this one on page 22:

"Look at the windshield, is that rain or isn't it?"
..."Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses."
..."Is it raining or isn't it?"
"I wouldn't want to have to say."
"What if someone held a gun to your head?"
"Who, you?"
"Someone. A man in a trenchcoat and smoky glasses. He holds a gun to your head and says, 'Is it raining or isn't it? All you have to do is tell the truth and I'll put away my gun and take the next flight out of here.'"
"What truth does he want? Does he want the truth of someone traveling at the speed of light in another galaxy? Does he want the truth of someone in orbit of a neutron star? Maybe if these people could see us through a telescope we might look like we were 2'2" tall and it might be raining yesterday instead of today."
"He's holding the gun to YOUR head. He wants your truth."
"What good is my truth? What if this guy comes from a planet in a whole different solar system..."
"His name is Frank J. Smalley and he comes from St. Louis."
"He wants to know if it's raining NOW, at this very minute?"
"Here and now. That's right."
"Is there such a thing as now? 'Now' comes and goes as soon as you say it. How can I say it's raining now if your so-called 'now' becomes 'then' as soon as I say it?"

If I had realized this book is packed full with those kind of boring,long conversations, I wouldn't have read it in the first place. That conversation was supposed to be between the main character Jack and his fourteen year old son Heinrich.

This book bored me to tears until the 38th chapter. There's too much in it that has little or nothing to do with the plot, which is basically about this family's obsessive fear of death. They're so afraid, they aren't even living! Their life is bland! Jack's wife Babette gets her hands on some anti fear drugs and takes them even though she's well aware of the risky side effects. In return, she sleeps with a man she calls "Mr. Gray," and the rest of the novel is Jack searching for more information about the shady character. Overall, I loathed this book with a passion.

I just a read a short story of his in the latest New Yorker and was reminded of this book, and it struck me how much he hasn't changed in 20 years. Fist of all academics writing about academics is as bad as writers writing a book about a writer writing a book. In general the book is condescending, obvious with characters who I had absolutely no interest in.

*DISCLAIMER* >>> I only read 140 pages of this book.

What I Liked:

-The sentences, their structure and variety.

What I Didn't Like:

-The post-modernism. The book seemed more concerned with critiquing society than [something having to do with the characters/being human].

What a stubborn, perplexing book. If I had any kind of life, I might resent the time this novel extracted from it to afflict me with its arch, dark-gray worldview.

I know, I know. Being that I didn't go to an Ivy League college, don't visit the Guggenheim for relaxation, or work out while listening to atonal music, I probably had little chance making any headway here. Don DeLillo is just out of my league. I'm like an ant trying to learn brain surgery reading this book.

So here's what happens, as best I can figure. A college professor named Gladney who chairs a department on Hitler studies in a nameless college finds he has contracted a strange contamination and finds himself unable to face the prospect of his death. He is befriended by a visiting professor who wants to form his own academic discipline around Elvis. Meanwhile, his wife takes these strange pills, and assorted children run about, having hyperliterate conversations about nucleotides and the perils of sugarless gum.

The point of the novel, as best I can figure, is that we are all surrounded by waves and waves of meaningless sounds, images, and information designed to prop us up through our brief sojourns along this mortal highway. "We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information," one of Gladney's colleagues says, before they get one courtesy of an "airborne toxic event" that afflicts Gladney with his sad condition.

Sad, except you never buy any of these people as real. Instead, they seem two-dimensional philosophic constructs designed to trot out some of DeLillo's often fascinating but always depressing ideas about the nature of man in a Godless universe. I couldn't get close to any of these people, not that I didn't try.

There are those like the New York Times reviewer who describe "White Noise" as comic, and there are some archly amusing lines. One professor congratulates Gladney thusly: "Nobody on the faculty of any college or university in this part of the country can so much as utter the word Hitler without a nod in your direction, literally or metaphorically...He is now your Hitler, Gladney's Hitler. It must be deeply satisfying for you." That's irony, in case you didn't guess, even more pronounced because the speaker's Jewish.

"White Noise" is certainly surreal. When a plane is about to crash, the voice on the address system informs the passengers: "We're a silver gleaming death machine." People fleeing the deadly cloud complain about the lack of media coverage. A friend of one of the children plans to insert himself in a glass cage with deadly mambas for 70 hours, to break the world record. There are moments of amusement, more dry chuckles than anything else. Certainly not engagement.

I've read a couple of other DeLillo novels and liked them. "Underworld" was also surreal, but I cared more about the characters and the situations they found themselves in. "Libra" is a solid examination of the Kennedy assassination, a tour de force of imaginative historical reconstruction.

But I found "White Noise" a mess. If you find otherwise, congratulations. Just don't say I didn't warn you.