White Noise

by Don DeLillo

Overview

Winner of the 1985 National Book Award—from the author of Zero K 

Jack Gladney teaches Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America where his colleagues include New York expatriates who want to immerse themselves in "American magic and dread." Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the usual rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism.

Then a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives, an "airborne toxic event" unleashed by an industrial accident. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladney family—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmerings—pulsing with life, yet heralding the danger of death.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140077025
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/28/1986
Series:	Contemporary American Fiction Series
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	14,029
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Don DeLillo published his first short story when he was twenty-three years old. He has since written twelve novels, including White Noise (1985) which won the National Book Award. It was followed by Libra (1988), his novel about the assassination of President Kennedy, and by Mao II, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

In 1997, he published the bestselling Underworld, and in 1999 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to a writer whose work expresses the theme of the freedom of the individual in society; he was the first American author to receive it. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Hometown:

Westchester County, New York

Date of Birth:

November 20, 1936

Place of Birth:

New York City

Education:

Fordham University, 1958

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the jurik food still in shopping bags—onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.

    I've witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one years. It is a brilliant event, invariably. The students greet each other with comic cries and gestures of sodden collapse. Their summer has been bloated with criminal pleasures, as always. The parents stand sun-dazed near their automobiles, seeing images of themselves in every direction. The conscientious suntans. The well-made faces and wry looks. They feel a sense of renewal, of communal recognition. The women crisp and alert, in diet trim, knowing people's names. Their husbands content to measure out the time, distant but ungrudging, accomplished in parenthood, something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage. This assembly of station wagons, as much as anything they might do in the course of the year, more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation.

    I left my office and walked down the hill and into town. There are houses in town with turrets and two-story porches where people sit in the shade of ancient maples. There are Greek revival and Gothic churches. There is an insane asylum with an elongated portico, ornamented dormers and a steeply pitched roof topped by a pineapple finial. Babette and I and our children by previous marriages live at the end of a quiet street in what was once a wooded area with deep ravines. There is an expressway beyond the backyard now, well below us, and at night as we settle into our brass bed the sparse traffic washes past, a remote and steady murmur around our sleep, as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream.

    I am chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. I invented Hitler studies in North America in March of 1968. It was a cold bright day with intermittent winds out of the east. When I suggested to the chancellor that we might build a whole department around Hitler's life and work, he was quick to see the possibilities. It was an immediate and electrifying success. The chancellor went on to serve as adviser to Nixon, Ford and Carter before his death on a ski lift in Austria.

    At Fourth and Elm, cars turn left for the supermarket. A policewoman crouched inside a boxlike vehicle patrols the area looking for cars parked illegally, for meter violations, lapsed inspection stickers. On telephone poles all over town there are homemade signs concerning lost dogs and cats, sometimes in the handwriting of a child.

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Excerpted from White Noise by Don DeLillo. Copyright © 1985 by Don DeLillo. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Editorial Reviews

Praise for White Noise:

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

“When I reread White Noise, I was struck by how hilarious it still is, how accurate to its moment and yet, like all great books, how it also speaks to this moment; the same absurdities and ironies still apply. . .  You now understand what people mean when they notice something in real life and describe it as DeLillo-esque. And things have only become more DeLillo-esque.”
—Dana Spiotta, The New York Times Book Review

“In White Noise, DeLillo nailed a structure of feeling that shapes our present consciousness.  What White Noise does well is render visible aspects of social and political life that have been normalized into near invisibility . . . Things still seem to be just like White Noise because of DeLillo’s gift for observing the world as if he had just been dropped into it.”
—Jordan Kisner, The Atlantic

“One of the most ironic, intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America . . . [White Noise] poses inescapable questions with consummate skill.”
—Jayne Anne Phillips, The New York Times Book Review

“Don DeLillo’s novels have evolved with society, ringing true even when they could or should feel outdated, but none are more prescient than White Noise . . . In the 1980s, DeLillo could never have dreamed where the world would end up, but his universal truths still hold. As we’re bombarded with emails, texts, and social media posts, the book is as relevant, if not more, than it ever was. All of us search for meaning as we experience daily FOMO on our phones, wishing for another life, one promised to us by advertising agencies and politicians. For that, the book is a perfect satire of the world we still live in.”
—Kevin Koczwara, Esquire

“DeLillo's eighth novel should win him wide recognition as one of the best American noveslists. . . . the homey comedy of White Noise invites us into a world we're glad to enter. Then the sinister buzz of implication makes the book unforgettably disturbing.”
—Newsweek

“A stunning book . . . it is a novel of hairline prophecy, showing a desolate and all-too-believable future in the evidence of an all-too-recognizable present. . . . Through tenderness, wit, and a powerful irony, DeLillo has made every aspect of White Noise a moving picture of a disquiet we seem to share more and more.”
—Los Angeles Times

“White Noise captures the quality of daily existence in media-saturated, hyper-capitalistic postmodern America so precisely, you don’t know whether to laugh or whimper.” 
—TIME

“DeLillo is a prodigiously gifted writer. His cool but evocative prose is witty, biting, surprising, precise . . . White Noise [is] arguably [his] best novel.” 
—The Washington Post
 
“Its brilliance is dark and sheathed. And probing. In White Noise, Don DeLillo takes a Geiger-counter reading of the American family, and comes up with ominous clicks."
—Vanity Fair

“A stunning performance from one of our most intelligent novelists . . . Tremendously funny.”
—The New Republic

“DeLillo’s love and flair for language unite to tell us [...] something discomforting about mortality and something profound about the way we deal with it. It may be a novel superabounding with words, but none of them are wasted.” 
—The Guardian

From the Publisher