White Noise by Don DeLillo

The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings. We weren't sure how to react. It was a terrible thing to see, so close, so low, packed with chlorides, benzines, phenols, hydrocarbons, or whatever the precise toxic content. But it was also spectacular, part of the grandness of a sweeping event, like the vivid scene in the switching yard or the people trudging across the snowy overpass with children, food, belongings, a tragic army of the dispossessed. Our fear was accompanied by a sense of awe that bordered on the religious. It is surely possible to be awed by the thing that threatens your life, to see it as a cosmic force, so much larger than yourself, more powerful, created by elemental and willful rhythms.

As Jack Gladney and his family move slowly through traffic, having been ordered to evacuate their homes after the accidental release of a black cloud of toxic chemicals, he looks into a furniture store and sees families inside shopping. He marvels for a moment at how different their understanding is than his own. Who's to say whose reaction is the right one? Which of them has the correct information and the correct analysis? Now, it's been at least fifteen years since I last read White Noise, which I know because there's no review for it on this blog. But it seemed almost serendipitous to me to pick this novel up again at this particular point in time: who hasn't had the experience, during the COVID pandemic, of looking into a crowded bar or restaurant and thinking, What the fuck are those people doing? Oh, right: there are lots of people who are in the bar looking out. They have different information, a different analysis.

I'd like to write about this more at length sometime, but I was struck by how much "The Airborne Toxic Event," the middle section of White Noise, resonates with the world during COVID. The crisis is different, but the reactions are the same: the fear, the need for decisive authority, the safety of information. White Noise is, perhaps more than anything, a book about information. See how Jack's friend Murray, a visiting professor at the same college, sits for hours with Jack's children watching television, saying that it's full of data. But data that suggests what? Jack is awash in information, but to what end? Every few pages, he overhears a fragment of a sentence from the television or radio shorn from context, useless. In the end, even the body becomes a site of information generation, as Jack becomes increasingly paranoid about the "seed of death" the Toxic Event has apparently planted in his body. He searches himself for symptoms, wondering if, when he feels them, they are invented or real. He asks, "Is a symptom a sign, or the thing itself?" Anyone who has opened the pickle jar to test their sense of smell or wondered about their scratchy throat these past few years must recognize that feeling. There is so much information, from within and without, but nothing can be discerned.

The final section of the novel, "Dylarama," is about the one thing that is certain: death. Discovering that his wife Babette has been taking part in an underground clinical trial for a pill that promises to rid one of the fear of death, he becomes desperate to track down the shady pillmaker who supplied it. I found this section as terrifying as I did fifteen-plus years ago, maybe more so, given that I'm fifteen years closer to my own death. You can't do anything about dying, and what White Noise suggests is that you can't do anything about the fear of death, either. The Information Age provides no answers, and neither does modern consumer culture, although it does provide a very funny scene where Jack approaches a kind of ecstasy by going on a shopping binge.

White Noise is funny. It's way funnier than it has any right to be, being so bleak. I loved the conversations Jack has with his family, each awash in its own kind of misinformation, whether about "Sunny Muslims," which are confused with Korean "Moonies," or the "sun's corolla." Perhaps more than any other writer--including Pynchon, who tries harder--DeLillo understands the absurdity endemic to life in America's late era, its foolish jargon, its inherent falseness and insincerity. Time hasn't dulled the acerbic nature of the novel at all; though it was published too early to reflect the true "Information Age," it seems almost prophetic in it vision of an America awash in bits and bytes of useless knowledge, contextless words and images. What's most remarkable about White Noise, though, is not how perfectly it captures a particularly timely spirit, but how something timeless--that fear of death--is revealed beneath all the--well, "white noise." White Noise might be the most hypermodern novel, but it's also one that paradoxically understands that some things never change, that there is something fundamental, even primeval, in human nature that cannot be changed.