White Noise—Don Delillo

How not to hear yourself think

“That little breath of Nyodene has planted a death in my body.”

Last weekend Jeri and I celebrated our 40^th wedding anniversary by going to Houston and taking in some big-city things. While I enjoy Houston in small doses, it doesn’t take long for it to get overmuch. We stayed at what they still call a B & B, even though breakfast doesn’t come with it. When I examined the room on arrival, I noticed a small, annoying device near the bed: a fan inside a small adjustable case with openings all around it. By twisting the case’s covering one could widen or narrow the openings. The landlord had thoughtfully left it running for us. I turned it off, and immediately felt the tension melt away. I thought at first it might dehumidify the room, but it seemed awfully small for that. So I searched for it on Amazon and realized, with a certain degree of awe, that I held in my hand,

THE ORIGINAL WHITE NOISE MACHINE, SIMPLIFIED: Beloved by generations since 1962, the Dohm Uno model features our fan-based natural white noise producing our signature sound – the soothing ambient sounds of rushing air, without the disturbance of actual moving air.

But really, I’d much rather have some actual moving air.

I would describe White Noise, the novel, as the noisiest book I have silently read. From the first page to the last, Delillo bombards us with consumerism and rapid-fire chatter. It felt like a Frank Capra movie at top volume—Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn at arms length, barking clipped, clever dialogue in mid-Atlantic accents.

I thought the novel terribly funny, mostly because of the absurdity of all the characters as they dash one way then another to escape thoughts of death—funny, dark, and damning. Jack Gladney, the narrator and protagonist, teaches a course in Hitler studies a small college in a small northern town. Back in the late '60s, Gladney had founded the field of Hitler studies, although he never learned to speak German (but he now takes private lessons, secretly). He teaches in the department of American environments (the college’s official name for popular culture), about which another professor has said, “I understand the music. I understand the movies. I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes.” This same professor teaches a course on the cinema of car crashes.

The first part, “Waves and Radiation,” immerses us in Gladney’s manic family as they surround themselves with various forms of dangerous radiation, like television or radio waves, to escape nagging thoughts of personal mortality. The whole family seems fascinated by catastrophes, earthquakes, mass murders, and crash landings. But such spectacles mostly make death distant or abstract for them. The following passage sums up how anesthetized they had become to personal danger: “The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire. We finished our lunch in silence.”

In the second part, “The Airborne Toxic Event,” a chemical spill forces everyone to evacuate the town. An accident on the freeway results in a cloud of some mysterious but deadly chemical, Nyodene D. Shortly after the spill, Jack’s precocious but maddeningly argumentative son, Heinrich, explains to his stepmother Babette and Jack that the authorities have ordered an evacuation.

Babette said, “Did you get the impression they were only making a suggestion or was it a little more mandatory, do you think?”

“It was a fire captain’s car with a loudspeaker and it was going pretty fast.”

I said, “In other words you didn’t have an opportunity to notice the subtle edges of intonation.”

“The voice was screaming out.”

“Due to the sirens,” Babette said helpfully.

“It said something like ‘Evacuate all places of residence. Cloud of deadly chemicals. Cloud of deadly chemicals.’”

We sat there over sponge cake and canned peaches.

“I’m sure there’s plenty of time,” Babette said, “or they would have made a point of telling us to hurry. How fast do air masses move, I wonder.”

They know things have become serious when the television news stops calling it a plume and starts calling it a black cloud. So, they evacuate, but Jack gets exposed to the chemical and begins to worry. He seeks advice about his condition. The medical technician enters some information into a computer and looks concerned.

He had a skinny neck and jug-handle ears to go with his starved skull—the innocent pre-war look of a rural murderer.

“Am I going to die?”

“Not as such,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Not in so many words.”

“How many words does it take?”

“It’s not a question of words. It’s a question of years. We’ll know more in fifteen years. In the meantime we definitely have a situation.”

“What will we know in fifteen years?”

“If you’re still alive at that time, we’ll know that much more than we do now. Nyodene D. has a lifespan of thirty years. You’ll have made it halfway through.”

“I thought it was forty years.”

“Forty years in the soil. Thirty years in the human body.”

“So to outlive this substance, I will have to make it into my eighties. Then I can begin to relax.”

Jack later explains his situation to a colleague this way. “That little breath of Nyodene has planted a death in my body. It’s now official, according to the computer. I’ve got death inside me. It’s just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.”

The first two sections of the novel set the tone, introduce us to Jack’s family and colleagues, and describe the unfolding of the airborne toxic event. Only in the last section, “Dylarama,” do we get to something like a plot, as Jack discovers and investigates a mysterious experimental drug Babette has apparently taken on the sly for a few months. The drug, Dylar, targets a small area of the human brain but they have to test it on humans because animals don’t have that area. Babette explains, “They isolated the fear-of-death part of the brain. Dylar speeds relief to that sector.” Without any change in the novel’s pacing, the tone of this third and final section shifts from dark rom-com to zany neo noir.

Delillo published White Noise in 1985, but I don’t see that a lot has changed in the last thirty-nine years. I don’t know whether that testifies more to the depth of the novel or the shallowness of our lives. While I thoroughly enjoyed White Noise, I did find the non-stop delivery of American kitsch exhausting. So, as happened when I turned off the Dohm Uno white noise model at our B & B minus the B, I felt a lot of tension melting away as soon as I put the book down.

This coming week, I plan to read a book from the Decade list that I found while in Houston, A Bend in the River, by V. S. Naipaul. And by the way, I recommend you visit the used book store, Kaboom Books, if you ever go to Houston. The owner selects his enormous inventory carefully, and seems to know darn near every book on the shelves.

Amazon links to works or products mentioned in this post.

White Noise, by Don Delillo

A Bend in the River, by V. S. Naipaul

Yogasleep Dohm Uno, the original white noise machine, simplified.

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