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ISBN 0-330-29108-4 (UK pbk)
novel, slipstream, postmodern, cyberpunk, social comedy
Winner of the American Book Award. One of the slipstream books most often linked to cyberpunk.
"Jack Gladney, who is chairman of the department of Hitler studies at Blacksmith College, is afraid of death. So is Babette, who 'gathers and tends the children'. Also afraid of death is Jack's son, Heinrich Gerhardt, whose best friend is training to break the world endurance record for sitting in a cage full of deadly snakes. That Hitler and death and poisonous snakes are so prominent in White Noise does not prevent it from being one of Don DeLillo's funniest novels to date. And that it is so funny doesn't mean it isn't eerie, brilliant, touching and as serious as death. It is heart-stopping, as if we were listening to a massive glacier breaking up." [jacket blurb, UK pbk, 1986]
"Delillo mixes diegetic dialogue and TV chatter in a collage reminiscent of cut-ups, but here the collage is not the result of a subversive authorial intervention, but is instead diegetically anchored to demonstrate the blip culture bombardment which already prohibits the reception of information. Delillo's characters search for a level of phenomenal, emotional reality against the white noise of a culture where the only monument is 'The Most Photographed Barn in America' and where Hitler is an academic department. White Noise takes place entirely within the cut-up continuum of Burroughs and the imploded America of Baudrillard's hyperbolic prophecies." --Scott Bukatman (in Terminal Identity , 1993).
Recommended.
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