White noise

Albert Mobilio

Albert Mobilio's review of White Noise appeared in the Village Voice on April 30, 1985. He is the author of two books of poetry, Bendable Siege and The Geographies.

DEATH BY INCHES

In Don DeLillo's first novel, Americana, published in 1971, a television producer embarked on a cross-country trip, camera in hand, from Madison Avenue to Dealey Plaza. His desire to nail down the gas-driven, motel-housed American soul indicated the scope of DeLillo's ambition and established one of his abiding themes: Americans' fondness for their own reflection. In seven subsequent novels he's watched us watch ourselves, measuring in keenly observant prose the depth and cost of that self-absorption. His richest conceit in developing this vision has been technology's ability to project the reassuring likeness—hence television's status as a character in many books. But broadcast waves just mediate the fascination; the mirror game is a human one. Its motivation is expressed without embarrassment by Americano's narrator: "When I began to wonder who I was, I took the simple step of lathering my face and shaving. It all became so clear, so wonderful. I was blue-eyed David Bell. Obviously my life depended on this fact."

Working a territory thick with social critics, DeLillo spares us the polemics. In the current New Criterion, he's accused of passing cynical judgments, but criticism of that sort misinterprets his tone. His tack is inquisitive, almost anthropological, as he serves up a variety of American specialties like college football (End Zone), leftists and the CIA (Running Dog), rock music (Great Jones Street), and Wall Street (Players). An intensely visual writer, DeLillo can locate and dissect the telling freeze—porchfront cocktails on a suburban Sunday or downtown Manhattan's rush-hour ballet. He illuminates the idiosyncrasies of our Reprinted by permission of Albert Mobilio.

tribal life with an indulgent grace that imparts a sense of communality where none was ever imagined. Yet the darker side of such attachments, the subterranean warfare Americans wage against their own cultural and ideological inventions, inspires his shrewdest insights.

What sets DeLillo apart from moralists like Heller or Bellow is an understanding of the complicitous bond between individual and institution. His novels actually celebrate the confusion over personal responsibility for public madness. To this end he turns the trick of making Wall Street or the CIA objects of wondrous contemplation, splicing a clipped lyricism with technical detail to produce descriptions of labyrinthine toys, exaggerated sums of private fears.

While DeLillo's Americans nurse paranoias large and small, they're most frightened of themselves. Apprentice schizophrenics living in willful isolation, these characters still maintain a practiced cool. Thinking tends to occur in quotation marks, acute self-awareness permitting only laconic assessments of surface activity. Their cramped, often abstract dialogue suggests that words aren't quite up to the job of saying what's felt. Sex is rendered topologically, in terms of tensed arcs and shifting planes: a poetry for wind-up romance. The implacable aloneness and emotional confinement surface repeatedly as amply qualified passion: "He was lean and agile. She found herself scratching his shoulders, working against his body with uncharacteristic intensity. Who is this son of a bitch, she thought." The narcissism is corrosive, potentially terminal; these people worry themselves to death.

DeLillo's new novel, White Noise, takes that possibility seriously, exploring the narcissist's inevitable trap: a preoccupation with dying. It's set in a college town where "the supermarket is the key to the neighborhood" and all traces of morbidity have been scrubbed clean. Here J. A. K. (the triad of initials concocted for effect) Gladney, world's foremost Hitler scholar, heads a Nazi studies department at a small liberal arts school. He's also obsessed to distraction by his own mortality. The study of Hitler, who appears "larger than death," provides an orderly myth; it's as close as Gladney can come to religious faith.

But Gladney's dark dreams aren't the only ones circulating around the College-on-the-Hill. DeLillo has great fun with a faculty composed of New York emigres who've come to the provinces in search of "American magic and dread." They haunt shopping malls, conduct classes in famous movie car crashes and the semiotics of food labeling, and pass the time recalling their whereabouts the day James Dean died. In an atmosphere where others revel in social pathologies, Gladney spreads some shadows of his own. Presiding over classes in black gown and sunglasses, he interprets films of Nazi party rallies: "Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying. To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone."

For solace, the professor turns to his family, a middle ground between fervent isolation and mass hysteria. A family took center stage in DeLillo's last novel, The Names; he examined its emotional strategies and hermetic codes with sympathetic insight absent from his earlier books. In White Noise he extends this evocation of the complex, colloquial textures of contemporary family life.

Gladney's a devoted father, deeply in love with his wife Babette, a stolid earth mother who teaches classes in correct posture to the elderly. The children—products of serial marriages—are a knowing and precocious bunch. Oldest son Heinrich (perversely named for Himmler?) plays mail chess with a death row convict and serves as in house sophist. The daughters cleave to the television, dispense crafted naiveté at the dinner table, and murmur brand names like Toyota Celica in their sleep. For recreation everyone shops.

DeLillo's surgical analysis of their domestic rituals uncovers the irresistible force proximity exerts on personality, a force that fuels Gladney's obsession. When infant son Wilder begins crying inexplicably and continues for hours, Gladney hears "an anguish so accessible that it rushes to overwhelm whatever immediately caused it. There was something permanent and soul-struck in this crying. It was a sound of inbred desolation." What he hears, of course, is his own unvoiced pain. Every embrace he and Babette share is followed by a silent refrain: Who will die first? . . . But ultimately DeLillo sees these human connections as too vital and necessary to be easily dismissed. In counterpoint he's drawn a compassionate picture of a primitive refuge in a modern "world of hostile fact."

The vulnerability of this refuge to technological assault constitutes the novel's rather thin plot. An overturned railroad car creates an "airborne toxic event" that forces evacuation of the town, and Gladney is exposed to Nyodene D, the rogue chemical. For the 52-year-old professor, news that the dose might prove fatal sometime within 35 years shouldn't be too dispiriting; his anxiety nonetheless reaches fever pitch. Waking in cold sweats becomes a nightly event. Jack's distress is compounded when he learns that his obsession is shared by the outwardly stable Babette, who has secretly volunteered to test Dylar—an experimental drug designed to eliminate the fear of death. The drug—a compact metaphor for technology's power to dim consciousness and blur its definitions—becomes Gladney's would-be cure. Heedless of its quirky side effects, like inducing confusion between nouns and objects, he pursues the pills from the family trash bin to the inventor's motel hideout. Gladney attacks his prey with the words "Hail of bullets," and drops him to the floor. Then, after wounding the scientist with real bullets, he rushes him to the hospital, neglecting to collect the Dylar. In the book's closing scene Gladney describes son Wilder pedaling his tricycle through four lanes of highway traffic. The child, oblivious to the danger, arrives safely on the other side, where he slips in a puddle and only then begins to cry.

The coda affirms the workaday usefulness of faith, however naive or contrived, and recalls its primal, complementary link to mortality. In the emergency room Gladney quizzes a nun who denies believing in heaven. She tells him, "Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe." This resolution, no doubt equivocal, still offers some possibility of escaping the self's prison. Indeed, it is the author's most optimistic reading of the situation yet.

In light of this, White Noise can be taken as a terse summa of DeLillo's work. Again he shows Americans to be a damaged breed, carnivores devouring their own tails. Our peculiar brand of extinction —which, as Gladney points out, deserves an aerosol spray can for a tombstone—embodies our deepest wishes. The technological prowess evidenced by carcinogens, television, and the fantasy drug Dylar serves a consumptive, and therefore fatal love of self. Its death rattle is heard in TV's electronic din, the book's "white noise." DeLillo, it seems, may lean a bit too hard here. While his grasp of television's fluid grammar and mime of broadcast patter are first-rate, perhaps he's come to regard the box as too sinister, too important. Granted, it lulls us with "coded messages and endless repetitions," and attractive footage of downed jets and hostage shoot-outs offers intimate knowlege of death. But . . . if death has been wrung free of mystery and meaning, larger factors must weigh in alongside the evening news as culprits.

This slight imbalance aside, the novel is perceptively targeted— and the writing, as usual, is sharp as cut glass. DeLillo becomes increasingly elliptical with every book, as if he's paring his prose to the style of a scientist's notebook. Paradoxically, the distillation is matched by a more subtle and convincing treatment of his characters' inner lives. This broadened emotional vocabulary charges White Noise with a resonance and credibility that makes it difficult to ignore. Critics who have argued his work is too clever and overly intellectual should take notice: DeLillo's dark vision is now hard-earned. It strikes at both head and heart.