Conversations with your smarter, more articulate, more attractive friend. These conversations include everything and occur at a plane you will never entirely comprehend. Happens. ( )

There exists, in my mind at least, a list of Must Read Novels that I’ve been attempting to whittle my way through. Perhaps I have mentioned this before.

The List is comprised of much-talked-about books from several countries, spanning several genres. Most of them, however, are planted squarely in the “literary fiction” category. Pynchon. Wallace. DeLillo. These are the names I have seen repeated on book lists all over the internet, interspersed with Murakami, Danieliewski and Stephenson.

This year I decided I would attempt to tackle as many as I could.

I just finished White Noise and I’m not even sure what to say about it. I’m not even sure what I read, or more precisely, what I took away from it. There’s so much to digest and at the same time it feels to me like I read three hundred plus pages of nearly nothing.

Let me get a few things out of the way. There were some points to the book that I just did not like. First and most important of these was the lack of individual voice. Everyone in this novel is a philosopher, despite most of them not fitting the type. Jack, our narrator, is a university professor, the Dean of Hitler Studies, which makes his long-winded musings somewhat believable. Murray, a colleague, is likewise understandably deep. However, even Jack’s children, some of whom are very young, have paragraph upon paragraph of musing on all manner of subjects. So does his fourth wife, and even his three ex-wives (when they make their cameos) are members of the Deep Thoughts Club.

What is the meaning of that? Is there a meaning at all? Are these people all, by chance, exceptional human beings?

My second point is slightly related to the first. What is the purpose of all of the ex-wives and ex-husbands, the children of confusing parentage and the now-you-see-them, now-they’re-gone appearances by loves from the past? Was there a point to cobbling together such a motley and difficult to remember family tree? Why all the former wives in the intelligence community? Does Jack have a spy fetish? Does he secretly harbor sexual fantasies of female James Bonds? Does this mean anything at all, or are they just minor red herrings thrown in the middle of the story to throw less worthy readers off the trail of the Real Underlying Message?

I don’t know, and I guess that’s the whole point of my having read White Noise. I’m not the target audience for this book. I honestly, truly and without sarcasm, don’t believe I’m intelligent enough for this book. If there’s a bigger picture at work here, it sailed straight over my head, which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the book at all. It was interesting, but in the end all I took from it was confusion.

2/5, possibly because of my own intellectual bankruptcy.

http://alookatabook.blogspot.com/2009... ( )

I actually finished this about a week ago and I'm still not quite sure if I liked it or not. Yes, the book was funny as hell in a lot of places. DeLillo's nothing if not a master of very dark humor. But still, at the end, all I found myself wondering was "What was the point?"

White Noise doesn't seem to even have a plot until the last of three sections. Surprisingly, it was the plotless sections I enjoyed the most. They were funnier and had some fantastic one liners. The third section, honestly, I'm not quite sure about. It had a plot, but it was kind of a stupid, over the top one that didn't make sense (to me) when taking the first two sections into consideration. The end of the book I read quickly just because I wanted to be done with it, and that's the worst reason to finish a book.

I'm giving the book a three for now. It's a neutral rating. In a couple years I plan to reread this book and hopefully, I'll have a better take on the book then. ( )

The thing about this book is that, contrary to the published review here, it is just so wrong--it's a book in search of easy, rather snide, answers to big complex questions.

The secret of this book's appeal is that it takes those hard questions--mortality, meaning, the nature of society--and makes the reader feel as if he or she has confronted them, when actually you haven't--it's just an occasion for self-congratulation and a bit of not-too-clever satire.

Someone mentioned Richard Russo, who is obviously brought to mind by this book--but Russo is funnier, a keener observer of both people and institutions, and altogether more honest. One doesn't walk away from Straight Man with the false sense of superiority which, I imagine, is DeLillo's strongest appeal for twenty-somethings (at least when they first read him) who lionize him. ( )

Déjà Vu: "White Noise" is about death. It is an ultra-dark comedy that mocks consumerism, academia, self-help psychology, and itself. It explores Hamlet's (that most death-obsessed of Shakespeare's heros) question, "For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil ..." Delillo's answer is waves, radiation, radio static, the hiss of a blank TV screen, the dull roar of traffic, the antiseptic murmur of air conditioning -- white noise.

Jack Gladney is a brooding hypochondriac, professor, and chairman of the Department of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill in idyllic Blacksmith Village. He and his wife, Babette, live with their children at the end of a quiet street, where at night "the sparse traffic washes past, a remote and steady murmur around our sleep, as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a stream." Their relationship is defined by endless discussion over who will suffer more when the other dies.

Jack's confidant at the college is Murray Siskind, ex-sports writer and visiting lecturer on Elvis Presley. In their many Socratic dialogues Murray is a comic doubter, who pursues a negative view of life. Murray at last plays a modern version of Hamlet's ghost (or perhaps Iago), urging Jack to vengeance and cold-blooded murder.

Jack's quest begins when one of the children discovers that Babette has been taking Dylar, an experimental drug, designed to overcome the fear of death. Jack's own fear of death propels him forward, investigating the drug, learning that his wife traded sexual favors for it, and climaxes in a show-down with the dealer.

Death threats are everywhere. Men in Mylex suits and respirators appear the local grade-school after a deadly toxic release. When Jack and Babette retrieve his daughter at the airport they learn that the plane had lost power in three engines, plummeting four miles, "a silver gleaming death machine," before miraculously regaining power.

An insecticide tank car ruptures and emits an airborne toxic cloud filled with the deadly byproduct Nyodene D. The cloud is an enormous dark mass that moves like a death-ship of Norse legend, forcing a general evacuation under the escort of men in Mylex suits and respirators. The cloud produces feelings of déjà vu --- the senseless reliving of senseless events. Jack is exposed, learns he is at risk of developing a nebulous mass, realizes that he will at some undetermined time die, and his desperation for Dylar grows.

The local insane asylum is a metaphor for Blacksmith Village, or perhaps College-on-the-Hill. When it burns down Jack sees a woman in a fiery nightgown walk across the lawn, "so lost to dreams and furies that the fire around head seemed almost incidental." The intensity of the apparition turns madness into reality.

Babette's vagabond father, Vernon Dickey visits. In a premonitory vision Jack sees the old man as "Death's errand runner, a hollow-eyed technician from the plague era, from the era of inquisitions, endless wars, bedlams, and leprosariums." Vernon is a harmless eccentric, but gives Jack a Zumwalt .22 caliber pistol (one of many Freudian symbols -- Vernon has a much larger pistol of his own). This gun, as must any gun in a novel, plays an key role in the unwinding of the plot.

Sister Hermann Marie, a nun at Iron City Lying In, Mother of Mercy Hospital, assures Jack that the nuns' task is to believe things that no one else takes seriously. "The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse."

Delillo's mockery spares little, preaches nihilism, and suggests that life is no more than a form of death, radio static, the hiss of a blank TV screen -- white noise. In the end the brilliant writing turns on itself. The elegant phrases, stunning images, and ingenious trains of thought, leave the reader in awe. And yet, the writing mocks itself and questions its own validity. Jack learns nothing at the end of his quest. Dylar is not at all what it appears to be. The end is like the beginning. Déjà vu.