White Noise

White Noise is a famous novel. It's one of the prime examples of postmodern literature, and it's the book that made Don DeLillo big. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1985--Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home was nominated as well. It's been analyzed to death: there are editions with the novel's text & criticism side to side.

So yes, indeed, all of the stuff you have read about White Noise is true. There's irony. Critique on television. Critique of consumer society. A lot of enumerations of consumer products. Enumerations of other stuff. Tiny snippets of commercials, documentaries, radio news, manuals. A protagonist that has been married 5 times to 4 women and who's a professor in Hitler studies. Musings about death. Stuff about popular culture. General stuff. Specific stuff. Bleak stuff. American stuff. Meta stuff. 310 pages and about 10 meta lines for the literature post grad to feast upon. The novel is self-aware indeed.

I thought that when tradition becomes too flexible, irony enters the voice. Nasality, sarcasm, self-caricature and so on.

A description like that might be off putting to some. But it also misses the point, as postmodern meta-ness is not even the novel's strength: it's all fairly transparent anyway. What's missing in most of the scholarly analysis I've read, is the humanity that underlies it all. White Noise, for me, was first and foremost a book with remarkable and deep emotional understanding of family life and fatherhood.

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