White Noise
by Don DeLillo
Summary
Jack Gladney invented Hitler studies. At the College on the Hill he is its chairman and its brand, robed and dark glassed, minting prestige from the century's horror, with one professional secret: he cannot read German. At home he presides, amiably, over a blended family of precocious children from assorted marriages, and over a marriage to Babette that runs on candour, supermarket trips and a shared, unspoken terror: who will die first?
DeLillo builds the first half from the hum of the household, television speaking from other rooms, brand names surfacing in sleeping children's mouths, tabloid metaphysics, campus colleagues theorising car crashes and Elvis, the most quotable comic writing of the decade. Then a tank car derails and the sky produces the Airborne Toxic Event, a black chemical cloud that empties the town, and Jack, herding his family through the evacuation, receives the modern sentence: an exposure, a data profile, death located inside him without symptom or schedule.
The last movement follows the fear underground. Babette has been secretly trading for Dylar, an experimental pill that promises to delete the fear of death, and Jack's hunt for it, and for the man who supplied it to her, carries this gentlest of narrators to a motel room with a gun, where the novel's comedy and dread finally occupy the same body.
Around three hundred and twenty pages.
Best for readers who want the definitive comic novel of consumer dread, in which the supermarket is the cathedral and death arrives as data.
Historical Context & Significance
White Noise won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1985 and was the breakout: Don DeLillo had published seven brilliant, thinly read novels in fourteen years, and this one carried his sentences into the general culture. Time later placed it among the century's hundred best novels, and the phrase Airborne Toxic Event passed into the language, taken up by a rock band and by every chemical disaster headline since; after Chernobyl, and again during the pandemic, the novel's evacuation chapters read less like satire than reporting.
It also founded a genre: the campus sections, Hitler studies and the Elvis seminar, made it the sourcebook for three decades of academic satire, and the book remains the standard syllabus representative of American postmodernism, the friendly door into it.
DeLillo followed with Libra and Underworld, the career consolidating into monument. Noah Baumbach filmed White Noise in 2022 with Adam Driver, the supermarket dance over the credits doing what adaptations of this writer can do: gesture at the voice.