White Noise (Contemporary American Fiction) - Softcover

DeLillo, Don

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140077022 ISBN 13: 9780140077025

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 1986

Winner of the National Book Award – a “eerie, brilliant, and touching” (New York Times) family drama about mass culture and the numbing effects of technology
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.

Review:

Better than any book I can think of, White Noise captures the particular strangeness of life in a time where humankind has finally learned enough to kill itself. Naturally, it's a terribly funny book, and the prose is as beautiful as a sunset through a particulate-filled sky. Nice-guy narrator Jack Gladney teaches Hitler Studies at a small college. His wife may be taking a drug that removes fear, and one day a nearby chemical plant accidentally releases a cloud of gas that may be poisonous. Writing before Bhopal and Prozac entered the popular lexicon, DeLillo produced a work so closely tuned into its time that it tells the future.

From the Publisher:

9 1.5-hour cassettes

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0140077022
• ISBN 13: 9780140077025
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 326