White NoiseText and Criticism

A contemporary classic.
From the vantage point of the 21st century, the 1985 novel White Noise by Don DeLillo seems profoundly prescient: Although published years before the explosion of the Internet, cell phones, wi-fi, blogs, MP3 players and pervasive pharmaceutical marketing, it anticipated precisely the predicament in which we find ourselves today, bombarded by "waves and radiation."

Set in a small Midwestern college town, White Noise tells the story of Hitler Studies professor Jack Gladney, his wife Babette and their children. When an "airborne toxic event" forces them to temporarily evacuate their home, everything changes. Jack faces death from exposure to the toxin; meanwhile, he learns that Babette is taking Dylar, an experimental medication to cure the fear of death. He unravels.

If the novel seems less cutting-edge than it once did, it is not because it has failed to hold up, but rather, because it has. Much like the characters in the novel, we obsess over media representation — even publishing our minutiae on blogs and social networking sites. Pharmaceutical advertisements whip up frenzied fears of disease, aging and death.

The audiobook, however, makes the novel new again. Veteran narrator Michael Prichard's nasal pitch at first sounds almost too theatrical, but he perfectly conveys the book's underlying anxiety and comedy. More than his voice, though, is the actual fact of listening to a digital file. I listened while pedaling at the gym, thirteen televisions flashing infomercials at the early morning crowd, and I listened at the bus stop and in the grocery store. Listened to like this, the "waves and radiation" of the novel take on a new resonance — colliding with reality to reveal the ridiculousness of it all.

White Noise won the National Book Award in 1985 and has since taken its rightful place as a contemporary classic.