White Noise

WHITE NOISE

by Don DeLillo

 

Award: National Book Winner 1985

 

Nomination: National Book Critics Circle Finalist 1985

 

Dates Read: February 11, 2005 & September 15, 2021

 

Jack Gladney, the founder of Hitler studies at an unnamed college in the U.S., is in a blended family and feeling content. Kids from his previous marriages and his current-wife’s previous marriages swirl around them in chaos, plus one wee they share between them. In the midst of all this noise and animation, Jack and Babette seem happy.

 

The one haunting fear for them both is death. While death is a common fear among all humans, death is particularly haunting to both Jack and Babette. They have countless conversations about who should die first. Or who they hope will die first. But what Jack doesn’t realize is that Babette’s fear is so profound that she answered a questionable add in a tabloid to participate in a study about the fear of death. She even went so far as to take an unapproved drug and sleep with the manager of the study for the privilege of doing so.

 

While the rift this causes in Jack and Babette’s relationship is not unrecoverable, Jack is obsessed with determining who the manager is since Babette only gave a fake name and a composite personality. 

 

A toxic “chemical event” brings all these things to the forefront of Jack’s existence. While evacuating the town with all their kids, Jack is irredeemably exposed to this toxicity when he gets out of the car for gas. In this context the “White Noise” of the title is the looming of death that is true for all of us. 

 

Of course, some humans want it to end and the end can’t come quick enough. For others, death is an unwanted inevitability that would only interrupt what we have spent so long creating. I have lived both of these realities and the latter is much more difficult. But I’d rather be in a place where I have so much invested in my life that I can’t bear to lose it.  

 

I know DeLillo had his own definition in mind when writing this novel but for me, the “White Noise” in this novel is all those things that happen in life that distract us from the truth of who we are and how temporarily we are here. The lights, sounds, bills, groceries, trash compactors, radios, chores, you name it. So much in life begs for our attention and we get so caught up in the business of living that we sometimes forget to live. To breathe. To feel. That, to me, is the ultimate “White Noise.”