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.