DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1986.

I put this on my comps list. It's another Important Novel. But this time I read it like a bitch, and found it a lot less unbearable than I used to. White Noise is best read as an historical farce, like The Country Wife or The Taming of the Shrew. It's an anatomy in the Northrop Frye sense, where characters announce in dialogue all the clear ideas they're meant to embody. Which of course is classic DeLillo; it's a mistake to write this guy off because his characters don't speak realistically.

It's not a mistake to write him off entirely, though. I've prattled on about DeLillo here before (and in fact, after rereading that post, just deleting the opening paragraph to this one, which repeated almost word for word the opening paragraphs of the first one...now who's unoriginal?), how tired he makes me. All of his standard faults are here, and for fun I will lay them out.

Fault the First: the obviousness of his seemingly pop-mystic ideas
Shall I give him a break and admit he was writing in 1984? Given what he had to say about "the last techno rave" in 2003, I will not. Here's Don on the modern supermarket:

Apples and lemons tumbled in twos and threes to the floor when someone took a fruit from certain places in the stacked array. There were six kinds of apples, there were exotic melons in several pastels. Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished, bright. People tore filmy bags off racks and tried to figure out which end opened. I realized the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension. (36)

It's called an industrial-sized air-conditioning unit, Don, and it's as boring as a baseball game. Passages like this are just so old-fashioned. Try getting away with this in your fiction. I know this is meant to be poetic. Ironically poetic, but can it these days be read as anything other than overwritten, amateur-hour horsecrap?

Fault the Second: his swooning love for the deadpan non sequitur
It's just everywhere in this novel:

[S]he wants to be the first to go. She sounds almost eager. She is afraid I will die unexpectedly, sneakily, slipping away in the night. It isn't that she doesn't cherish life; it's being left alone that frightens her. The emptiness, the sense of cosmic darkness.

MasterCard, Visa, American Express.

I tell her I want to die first. (100)

Ha! This is such dorky, ridiculous writing!

Fault the Third: his boomer sanctimony
This novel is by needs obsessed with consumerist spaces. Malls, supermarkets, etc. And J.A.K. Gladney, the Hitler studies chair who narrates the book, spends much time on how adept he and his family are at traversing these mystical consumerist spaces. It gets pretty self-congratulatory, but as I can't find a passage you'll have to take my word for it. At any rate, at some point near the opening of the novel, the old blind man Gladney's wife reads to gets lost with his sister in the mall. Here's what Gladney has to say about it:

It was probably just the vastness and strangeness of the place and their own advanced age that made them feel helpless and adrift in a landscape of remote and menacing figures. The Treadwells didn't get out much. (59 emphasis added).

It's here (in the book, and it's here in my post now that I feel I should turn to "serious study," as something legible has to go in my final, proper annotated bibliography) that I found it easy to dismiss most of the things Gladney has to say. Here's where the farce came in. Because is a man so hypersensitive to everything happening to him and around him so unable to utter lines like those above and not realize their easy application to his own self, his own place in the world? Gladney likes to think he gets out much, but other than the supermarket and the campus, he spends all his time at home. Even that trip to the mall is rendered as a kind of special treat for the family. And if there's anything clearly the matter with Gladney it's that his own "advanced age" has made him fall adrift within his landscape. He may be another sanctimonious prick (there's a bit of a glut of them in this novel), but his son Heinrich's deftness in this world is far greater in relation to Gladney's than Gladney's is in relation to the Treadwells. Doesn't he see this? Doesn't DeLillo?

Probably not. I imagine DeLillo doesn't get out much, either. And when he does I'm sure he's armed with a pencil and pad, boring the shit out of all of his "friends".