Description
Book SynopsisThe National Book Award-winning classic from the author of Underworld and Libra, soon to be a major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig
White Noise is the story of Jack, his wife, Babette, and their four ultramodern offspring. They live in a college town where Jack is Professor of Hitler Studies (and conceals the fact that he does not speak a word of German), and Babette teaches posture and volunteers by reading tabloids to a group of elderly shut-ins. They are happy enough, until a deadly toxic accident and Babette's addiction to an experimental drug make Jake question everything.
White Noise is considered a postmodern classic and its unfolding of themes of consumerism, family and divorce, and technology as a deadly threat have attracted the attention of literary scholars since its publication. This Viking Critical Library edition, prepared by scholar Mark Osteen, is the only edition of
White Noise t
Trade ReviewPraise for White Noise:Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction “One of the most ironic, intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America . . . [
White Noise] poses inescapable questions with consummate skill.”
—Jayne Anne Phillips, The New York Times Book Review“DeLillo’s eighth novel should win him wide recognition as one of the best American noveslists. . . . the homey comedy of
White Noise invites us into a world we’re glad to enter. Then the sinister buzz of implication makes the book unforgettably disturbing.”
—Newsweek“A stunning book . . . it is a novel of hairline prophecy, showing a desolate and all-too-believable future in the evidence of an all-too-recognizable present. . . . Through tenderness, wit, and a powerful irony, DeLillo has made every aspect of
White Noise a moving picture of a disquiet we seem to share more and more.”
—Los Angeles Times “
White Noise captures the quality of daily existence in media-saturated, hyper-capitalistic postmodern America so precisely, you don’t know whether to laugh or whimper.”
—TIME“DeLillo is a prodigiously gifted writer. His cool but evocative prose is witty, biting, surprising, precise . . .
White Noise [is] arguably [his] best novel.”
—The Washington Post “Its brilliance is dark and sheathed. And probing. In
White Noise, Don DeLillo takes a Geiger-counter reading of the American family, and comes up with ominous clicks.”
—Vanity Fair“A stunning performance from one of our most intelligent novelists . . . Tremendously funny.”
—The New Republic “DeLillo’s love and flair for language unite to tell us […] something discomforting about mortality and something profound about the way we deal with it. It may be a novel superabounding with words, but none of them are wasted.”
—The GuardianTable of ContentsWhite NoiseIntroduction
Chronology
I. White Noise: The TextII. Contexts
ANTHONY DECURTIS, from Matters of Fact and Fiction
ADAM BEGLEY, from Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction
CARYN JAMES, "'I Never Set Out to Write an Apocalyptic Novel'"
DON DELILLO, from Americana
DON DELILLO, from End Zone
DON DELILLO, from Players
DON DELILLO, Silhouette City: Hitler, Manson and the Millennium
Newsweek, Stories on the toxic leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India
III. Reviews
SOL YURICK, Fleeing Death in a World of Hyper-Babble
ALBERT MOBILIO, Death by Inches
DIANE JOHNSON, Conspirators
PICO IYER, A Connoisseur of Fear
IV. Critical Essays
TOM LECLAIR, Closing the Loop: White Noise
FRANK LENTRICCHIA, Don DeLillo's Primal Scenes
JOHN FROW, The Last Things Before the Last: Notes on White Noise
JOHN N. DUVALL, The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Meditation in DeLillo's White Noise
CORNEL BONCA, Don DeLillo's White Noise: The Natural Language of the Species
ARTHUR M. SALTZMAN, The Figure in the Static: White Noise
PAUL MALTBY, The Romantic Metaphysics of Don DeLillo
Topics for Discussion and Papers
Selected Bibliography
