White Noise

Don DeLillo's White Noise has turned into one of my comfort reads at some point in the past year or two, which surprised me. It's such a peculiar book. Admittedly, perhaps I wouldn't think it quite so peculiar if not for the sequence that takes place in Iron City's Germantown--and I'm not suggesting that the sequence is a misstep or something that the reader is the least bit unprepared for. Nor can I imagine how else DeLillo would have concluded the narrative, without that sequence, but that may be the key: I didn't expect a big finish from that book. I thought the Airborne Toxic Event would be the big plot bomb, and everything else would meander around it.

I once read an article (which I can no longer track down) devoted to explaining the author's loathing of White Noise as both overrated and basically empty. According to that critic, one of the text's key failures is the lack of distinction among the different voices; indeed, most of the characters do sound disconcertingly alike. They are all information gatherers. Some, like Heinrich, are more aggressively empiricist than others (e.g. his argument with his father about the ability to conclusively state that it is raining), but they're all prone to asking strings of sometimes unanswerable questions, and to exchanging correct and incorrect information without doing much to distinguish the correct from the incorrect. DeLillo gives the impression that they are breathless with information to convey and exchange and, sometimes, to dissect to the bare bones that might (but probably won't) reveal some nugget of emotional fact.

I'm surprised I like this book, in the end, because DeLillo's style should create the kind of sterile, remote narrative voice and characters that I usually can't appreciate much at all--as is the case with Martin Amis's or James Joyce's fiction. And I don't think it did. But I can't pinpoint how he pulled off that difference, or managed that small but crucial glimmer of warmth in a narrative otherwise swimming in irony.

(Is it just that he likes Jack and Babette and Murray? Or is the difference me, and my ability to identify with these characters? I'm a speculator; I'm notorious for asking peculiar, unanswerable questions.)