May 2022. White Noise by Don DeLillo
1985, Penguin Books, 373 pages. Written in English, read in English.
There’s a certain quality to some of Paul Auster’s books, in which once you’ve read the first paragraph, the story is hurtling forward until you reach the end of the book — regardless of whether the story has closure or not. Reading Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” feels very similar, with an exception — it doesn’t seem that anything is actually happening throughout most of the beginning of the novel.
There is a professor — Jack Gladney — who has constructed his own department in his university around advanced studies of Hitler’s life; he has a family, following a third marriage, comprised of children from previous marriages and from the current marriage — some constantly arrive to visit, leave to visit other parents — he has colleagues, some more eccentric than others; he has the unusual predicament of not actually knowing German, and he makes an effort to learn it.
As these mundane events unfold, continuing not to warrant a full novel, DeLillo employs the strategy of referring to other events, that we will soon find out are the main drivers of the narrative, in a very concise manner, off-handedly at the end of a chapter.
When events actually start to accumulate and push the narrative forward, we understand that the constant descriptions of mundane life were there on purpose. Generally, the message of the novel has to do with the deterioration of our quality of life as a corollary of ongoing pollution. Therefore, an amorphous cloud of a dangerous chemical that is the result of a train crash drives the family out of their home into a shelter, and costs the protagonist a potential effect on his health and his life span; several similar events happen and are met with the same narrative shrug as that main narrative drive — eventually everything is being run in parallel — modern everyday life just becomes accustomed to being interrupted by potential catastrophic events, caused by lack of care to the environment and to all of earth’s inhabitants.
The other main theme of the novel, also revealed at the latter part of the novel as a tie-in of all of the little details that were presented, but did not make sense in the grand scheme of things, is a debilitating fear of death — that both the protagonist and his current wife seem to share. A strange novel pill is introduced that is supposed to be capable of curing that fear of death, and it sets both the protagonist and his wife in pursuit, crossing boundaries of decency and legality. When the novel has ground to a halt, everything has returned to the same safe, mundane equilibrium, into which new crises have been, and are bound to continue to be, folded into.
The June 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler.
The July 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess.
