Day 907, Quasi-Quarantine: "White Noise" Transcends Satire With A Scathing, Hysterical Assessment Of Contemporary Society

 

"In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past."

Resisting any genre labels, "White Noise" is a brilliant satire that is part commentary on consumerism, part observation of environmental degradation, part statement on the dissolution of the nuclear family, and part vivisection of academia -- among other themes. 

Don DeLillo's clever, flowing language and believable dialogue lend an air of modernity to this example of postmodern literature, making the novel feel much fresher than its nearly 40 years.

"These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it's the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornados. I'm a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those floods?

"I'm not just a college professor. I'm the head of a department. I don't see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That's for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are."

The much-divorced pioneer of Hitler studies, Jack Gladney, navigates his midlife crisis under the specter of a radiation event. As he juggles a morass of children, stepchildren, and exes, Gladney is in constant struggle against the reality of his own mortality.

That the author is able to render the pervasive feeling of impending doom into a comedic undercurrent is a tribute to DeLillo's literary brilliance and nuanced grasp of issues of mortality and culture.

"Murray said, 'I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.'"