WHITE NOISE - Don DeLillo - Fiction

Do we still bandy about the concept of the Great American Novel? Is there anything to be said about our reliance on consumption, our supermarkets, our television? DeLillo may have drawn the curtains on observations of our depraved, superficial natures. It has now become ironic and passe to draw attention to these aspects of Americanism, and it is this irony which is itself now the subject of novels drawing attention to the depths of our national character. What we would now think of as the supremely ironic class, the cultural theorists that make up the Eastern university at which DeLillo's protagonist, Gladney, teaches, are instead presented as deadly earnest in their devotion to cultural minutiae, a small bellwether that points to the differences and decade-and-a-half between, say, WHITE NOISE and PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER.

By comparing those two, I betray my tastes towards the novel, and the genre of rampant cultural navel-gazing as a whole: I didn't like it. I'd prefer not to. Of course, some of Gladney's observations are spot-on, and of course his children, especially his sons, are quite interestingly characterized--one, the somewhat morbid and disturbing fact-collector and philosophizer, the other quite obviously autistic and willfully undiagnosed, untreated, and unrecognized--but ultimately, what do we gain from reading about the supermarket as the great center of rebirth, of housefires as the most recent recharacterization of the primordial firepit, around which the tribe gathers to pass on life lessons? What is the point in repeating brand names that get enough repetition on the news as it is? Is pointing something out by continuing it actually helping? I have the same concerns with documentaries that point out the plight of starving children or neglected animals, and yet do nothing to help the very problem that they are pointing out as so drastic and worthy of our immediate help. Is writing a novel about the worst aspects of American culture not simply contributing to that culture? Wouldn't it be better and more satisfying to either redeem, as David Foster Wallace and Michel Faber do in their writing, or to change and permute, as Dave Eggers and Miranda July? DeLillo attempts a near-perfect mirror that only sickens, where, for example, Bret Easton Ellis instead chooses a rusted, twisted mirror that grows more and more distorted as our gaze progresses downward, both entertaining and wrapping us in his vision.

It could be that my reaction to the novel is a lack of familiarity with the very specific time and place which it describes. WHITE NOISE was published in 1985, and I was born three years later--altogether too late to perceive the zeitgeist that DeLillo captures. There seem, now, perfect holes in DeLillo's narrative to talk about the internet, about social media, about neoconservatives and 9/11 and shock talk radio, and, in short, everything that came after WHITE NOISE and yet somehow seems presaged by it. Is this a measure of the novel's success, of DeLillo's prescience, or of culture's imperturbability, the inevitability of its course and of the long, muddy, s-winding curve of human nature?

After reading WHITE NOISE, everything seems like a DeLillo interlude. At the bank today, the teller tried to talk to me about the tv show "Jon and Kate Plus Eight." At the supermarket, individual-sized bottles of ranch dressing. Nestle recalling its prepackaged cookie dough because people are eating it raw and getting salmonella. Swine flu. The reaction to swine flu, and the strange non-event it is when a baby is diagnosed with it--here are the fluids, here are the medications, go home and wait it out. Jack Gladney is perpetually interested in defining the point of his wife, "the point of Babette." This seems to be the most salient idea to take from the novel--the idea that rather than caricaturing the people we don't know, it is the people closest to us who come to take on symbolic value, who stand for things and are "about" things and have "a point" and who disastrously, inevitably, betray our expectations.

THE WITHDRAWAL METHOD - Pasha Malla - Fiction

There are certain motifs in Malla's short stories--terminal diseases, childhood innocence, underemployed twenty-somethings--that make you wonder about his own experiences. That, and the fact that one of his narrators shares his name. Autobiographical or not, these stories are intricately constructed and minimally revealing, diving into uncomfortable and even melodramatic territory. Malla's subjects range from a more or less successful foray into historical fiction (telling the story of the Mechanical Turk chess-playing machine as it travels from owner to owner, and is eventually destroyed in a museum fire) to a story, THE SLOUGH, which starts out as something approaching science fiction (involving a cream that allows the user to shed his skin in one piece, like a snake) but then abruptly changes course, concerning itself with the main character's skin cancer, making the reader wonder whether the first half of the story was supposed to be a tale the narrator tells himself to make talking about his girlfriend's illness more bearable.

Malla isn't afraid to talk about anything, really. There are two separate stories that really seem to glory in the repetition of the word 'vagina,' two that describe in detail the way a woman cleans herself after sex. One story is about a pet therapy center in the basement of a hospital having problems when a bonobo chimp takes a liking to the pet sheep in residence. I don't mean to be prudish, but Malla goes the distance.

The most tightly wound story of the bunch, the most affecting and the most richly detailed, is THE PAST COMPOSED, which manages to work in a midwife, a lost child and a lost marriage, and a neighborhood orphan determined on deluding either himself or those around him that he has a family--a very revealing story, but the story that should go in fiction anthologies under "Show, Don't Tell," as it manages to work in every plot point as an off-hand revelation, allowing the reader to connect all the dots.

The second best is a very short, two-page story that closes the collection, a bit of historical-fiction-cum-fan-fiction titled WHEN JACQUES COUSTEAU GAVE PABLO PICASSO A PIECE OF BLACK CORAL. Based off a real event in Cousteau's autobiography, the piece manages to hint at a deeper relationship between the two and throw off some beautiful imagery, of the coral passed between two palms, the painter shrugging and putting it in his pocket, only to use it to seal a subsequent goodbye handshake between the two. The story is all about gesture, and unspoken feeling sublimated into physical proximity, and succeeds wonderfully. Not one uncomfortable moment to be found.

EVERYTHING RAVAGED, EVERYTHING BURNED - Wells Tower - Fiction

Wells Tower's stories have that McSweeney's, fiction-workshop feel to them. And that isn't a bad feel. Two of the stories are the same tale, told from the different points of view of two of the main characters. One is the story of a raid, narrated by a Viking who doesn't want to vike anymore. There are the usual suspects--adultery, a young girl being seduced by an older man, an older man preying on a young boy. In one of the most disturbing but surprisingly unexplored passages, a father driving his daughter and his ex-wife's new husband home from camp is told that his daughter's disturbing habit of falling asleep on car rides with the gearshift in her mouth is just something she does to calm down. Try to get a mental image of your daughter's new stepfather telling you that her fellating part of a car is no big deal. There's something a little exploitative in these stories, as there is in the conversation between a stepmother and son, in "Executors of Important Energies," in which she complains to the young man that she wishes she could go back and have sex with everyone who ever offered. The story "Door in Your Eye" is built around the interactions of a father and daughter, each determined to make the other uncomfortable--the daughter through her fearlessness, and the father, inexplicably, by bringing up his sex life again and again. One gets the sense that these are not quite real people.

But that's okay! For all the concern and hand-wringing over the departmentalization of the short story, the workshop effect and the over-edited, purposely quirky feel of the story-writer's story, these are great. These are the real thing. These are rude, petty, self-absorbed people who throw away money, and kill their pets by accident, and are just a little pissed off that their date with a new man ends abruptly when the man's son is molested in an outhouse. In a way, these are updated fairytales, with evil stepparents, where the prize to be won is a new, more confident and popular self. You can think of them as exercises for a budding writer.

If you like the types of stories that make it to the BEST AMERICAN NON-REQUIRED READING anthologies, or ST LUCY'S HOME FOR GIRLS WHO WERE RAISED BY WOLVES or a more masculine, gruff Miranda July, give Wells a try.