The Sunday Times (London)
October 30, 1994, Sunday
On the Shelf
BYLINE: Stephen Amidon
SECTION: Features
LENGTH: 869 words
STEPHEN AMIDON relishes Don DeLillo’s harrowing White Noise.
White Noise (Picador Pounds 5.99) was published, appropriately enough, in 1984. Although the general feeling back then was that we had managed to lay George Orwell’s prophetic soul to rest, Don DeLillo’s astonishing novel proved a timely reminder that we were not yet out of the woods. Indeed, DeLillo’s portrayal of a nightmare world, shot through with media-fed paranoia and institutional menace, would probably have given Orwell the shivers.
The plot is simple enough. The book’s narrator, Jack Gladney, is a 50-year-old professor of Hitler Studies at a small midwestern college. He lives with his fourth wife, Babette, a part-time teacher who ”gathers and tends” their numerous children. Gladney’s constant low-level anxiety about the data-saturated world surrounding him is cranked up to maximum when a boxcar filled with ominous chemicals splits open at a nearby switching yard. Briefly exposed to this ”airborne toxic event”, Gladney becomes obsessed with his own death, particularly after a doctor tells him that his computerised test results have come up, showing ”bracketed numbers with pulsing stars”. Matters are further complicated when he discovers that Babette has begun taking part in secret psychological experiments run by a shadowy character known only as Dr Gray.
What makes White Noise unforgettable is not its story, however, but DeLillo’s trenchant vision. Nearly every one of its 300 pages crackles with memorable moments and perfectly turned phrases. The rich fathers of college students give off auras of ”massive insurance coverage”; television possesses a ”narcotic undertow”; people long to inhabit ”pre-cancerous times”. A teenage girl’s address book contains nothing but phone numbers, indicating a ”race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness”. When a ”silver gleaming death machine” (or aeroplane) goes into freefall, all the stewardess can do is fumble with a ”Manual Of Disasters”.
A sense of loss hangs over an alleged serial killer’s yard when two bodies are found not from grief for the victims, but rather because of the low body-count. Psychics called in to find missing persons fail to locate their subjects, but do manage to lead police to the scenes of other, unreported crimes. In DeLillo’s world, even the most innocuous items crackle and hum with dark insinuation. A white noise of menace pervades the book. Only Gladney’s 14-year-old son, Heinrich raised on television, junk food and broken homes seems to understand the implications of it all.
Despite this buzz of doom, DeLillo’s take on reality is fundamentally comic and all the more frightening for it. He never forgets to remind us that the expression on a skull’s face is a big grin. Humorous set-pieces riddle the novel. The airborne toxic event causes intense feelings of deja vu in its victims, so that people trying to escape from it keep turning back, in the belief that they have already been this way before. During the panic after the leak, the only sign of authority is a group of officials who are, in fact, merely conducting a simulated evacuation, having decided that now would be as good a time as any to practise their craft. When Gladney later asks a doctor if he is going to die, the response is hilariously chilling ”Not as such”. The only faith possible in such a world is the grim hope that there is someone out there who at least cares enough to oppress us.
It is hardly surprising that Gladney and Babette are so preoccupied with the prospect of their own demise. Morbid imagery pervades their lives. Television news, violent films and tabloid newspapers have created a sort of Death-o-rama that plays everywhere they turn. Thanks to celluloid, Elvis lives and Hitler still rants at Nuremberg. One of Gladney’s colleagues explains that the only reason for tolerating California is that death and disaster are plentiful there and, unlike India or Africa, it is on-camera, standing-by. In the end, Gladney is only able to snap out of his paranoia by having a showdown with the Mephistophelian Gray, who turns out to be one Willie Mink, a gibbering wreck suffering from a drug-induced ”brain fade”.
By pharmaceutically erasing his fear of death, Mink has also cancelled his humanity. This epiphany allows Gladney to return to his family and enjoy a beautiful (albeit chemically tinted) sunset. It is a surprisingly comforting finale to an otherwise harrowing book, an unexpectedly warm heart beating at the centre of this dizzying, darkly beautiful fiction.
