Don DeLillo was born in 1936 and grew up in the Bronx, a location where his prophetic 1990 novel Underworld is set. He is the author of sixteen novels of which White Noise, his tenth, was his breakthrough, garnering both popular and critical praise.
White Noise, set in a sleepy college town aptly named The-College-on-the-Hill, concerns Jack Gladney, professor of the newly established Hitler studies at the university in the same town, and his wife and various children from multiple marriages. The aftermath of a disaster brings into question the American ideas of family and mortality and consumerism's role in each.
DeLillo describes the inspiration for White Noise as a rash of strange television broadcasts, wherein disasters were presented without faces:
I lived abroad for three years, and when I came back to this country in 1982, I began to notice something on television which I hadn't noticed before. This was the daily toxic spill--there was the news, the weather, and the toxic spill. This was a phenomenon no one even mentioned. It was simply a television reality. It's only the people who were themselves involved who seemed to be affected by them. No one even talked about them. This was one of the motivating forces of White Noise. (qtd. in Rothstein 24)
These "daily toxic spills" manifested in the event that opens the novel, the startling "Airborne Toxic Event", a large black cloud of highly dangerous chemicals spilled from a train derailment near The-College-on-the-Hill. In a nod to the constant bombardment of the same sorts of advertising one in the 1980s might have experienced, the cloud causes déjà vu in those who come in contact with it.
Family and the town intersect in so many ways as to be nearly inseperable. And yet the Gladney represent a "new" kind of family, one that challenges the archetypal nuclear ones. A family of multiple ex-wives and -husbands, children from this marriage and that — the Gladney's threaten the stability of the family. And the family of the 80s was a more nebulous concept as ever before, with divorce rampant and convention overturned. So nuclearization became an illusion under which lay numerous familial combinations.
But more than that, almost everyone in the extended Gladney family of White Noise is obsessed with death. DeLillo admits that in many respects it stems from his being raised Catholic: "For a Catholic, nothing is too important to discuss or think about, because he's raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and that if he doesn't live his life in a certain way this death is simply an introduction to an eternity of pain" (qtd. in Passaro).
Despite being areligious, the cloud of death looms figuratively and literally large. The Airborne Toxic Event which preoccupies the first third of the novel is a symbolic treatment of this coming death, which one wishes to avoid.
Consumerism the main avenue people in The-College-on-the-Hill take to escape the inevitable. In cheating death, these townspeople cheat the town of its second function, the ever-rotating, churning of life itself.
Jack's children, New York Times reviewer Jayne Anne Phillips finds, "are in general more competent, more watchful, more in sync than their parents; emotionally, they constitute a kind of early-warning system." They escape the fear of death by buying into the constant stimulus around them. Most of the children can be found sitting in front of TVs or listening to radios or concerned with the inconceivably fast-paced world they have inherited.
Jack, on the other, sees the new field of pharmacuticals as his frontier, his guardian against his death, which he finds out will come sooner than expected (even though the doctors are unsure when — just as death comes whenever unexpectedly) because of his exposure to the Airborne Toxic Event. Funnily enough, it takes such a traumatic event to jolt Jack out of complacency and into panic, only to wish to return to that complacency. But that is why towns are so important: it is when they lose that complacent element that the truth is reveiled. Moreover the Toxic Event is physical jolt, for the family is uprooted for their home, if only briefly, and find themselves facing a stark reality in the city, trapped in a stifling room until it is safe again to return to their old lives.
In all, "[t]o become a crowd is to keep out death", as DeLillo puts in his book — that is to become the white noise, to fall back into the faceless nobodies (Anderson might have the opposite to say; however, his and DeLillo's conclusions are similar: that isolation, in the end, is the worst for man and leads him down a horrible path) (70).
Above is one half of 99 Cent II Diptychon (2000) by photographer Andreas Gursky. It is hauntingly like those many passages in White Noise, notably those form Jack's collegue Murray who revels in the experience, of grocery stores and shopping with its bright colors and lights and names and consistent novelty.
Works Cited
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 2010. Print.
Passaro, Vince. "Dangerous Don Delillo." New YorkTimes Books. The New York Times Company, 19 May 1991. Web. 4 May 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/16/lifetimes/del-v-dangerous.html>.
Phillips, Jane Anne. " Crowding Out Death." Rev. of White Noise, Don Delillo. New York Times Books 13 January 1985. Web. 4 May 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/16/lifetimes/del-r-white-noise.html>.
Rothstein, Mervyn. Thomas DePietro, ed. "A Novelist Faces His Themes on New Ground." Conversations with Don DeLillo. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Print.
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