White noise

Pico Iyer

Iyer's review of White Noise appeared in Partisan Review 53 in 1986.

A CONNOISSEUR OF FEAR

Writing of death, Don DeLillo takes one's breath away. A private man issuing a strangely private kind of fiction, he is the closest thing we have to an Atomic Age Melville. That rarest of birds, a novelist on fire with ideas—and an outlaw epistemologist to boot—he uses his fictional excursions as occasions to think aloud in shadowed sentences, speak in modern tongues, plumb mysteries, fathom depths. In book after cryptic book, DeLillo circles obsessively around the same grand and implacable themes—language, ritual, breakup, death. How to make sense of randomness or piece together identity? How, in a centrifugal world of relativity, to steady oneself with absolutes? How, in the end, to get across the untellable?

The DeLillo universe is an ordinary world transfigured by extraordinary concerns, a quotidian place seen in the terrifying white light of eternity. Thus White Noise is furnished with all the suburban props of the all-American novel: an amiably rumpled middle-aged professor, his plump earth-motherly wife, bright children from scattered marriages, a nuclear family in a pleasant postnuclear home. Their story is unlikely, however, to be mistaken for a fifties sitcom. The academic, Jack Glad-ney, teaches Advanced Nazism at the College-on-the-Hill; the matriarch leads adult education classes in posture; Gladney's three exwives all have ties with the intelligence community; and the fourteen-year-old eldest child of the household, Heinrich Gerhardt, has both a receding hairline and a philosophical bent—on his first appearance in the novel, he solemnly proclaims, "There's no past, present or future outside our own mind. The so-called laws of motion are a big hoax. Even sound can trick the mind."

Nothing in DeLillo's world is casual, nothing free of occult significance. Dark forces swirl around the bright, plastic artifacts of Anytown, U.S.A., and the country seems nothing but a gleaming library of portents. Bills, bank statements, the brand names of cars are recited as if they were mantras; tabloids are read as fragments from an American Book of the Dead; the television is consulted as a mystic oracle in the dark. The very title of the book, we learn, refers to death: the static of our lives is thus the sound track of our dying.

Yet of all the subversions of the everyday, the nightmare turns on the American Dream, the most unnerving comes when the Gladneys pile into the family station wagon and head off on what resembles a picnic. It is in fact a nuclear evacuation. The huge cloud of escaped poison gas that drifts through the novel's central episode as symbol, prophecy, white whale and man-made black death all in one seems at first to be the stuff of routine sci-fi apocalypse (though, in a harrowing, but not unexpected irony, this book came out at the same time as the Bhopal disaster). Yet the effect of the rogue chemical is almost entirely internal. In the wake of the fugitive cloud, Gladney brings up pulsing stars on a computer. What does that mean? The poison has entered his system; he has come to incarnate death.

It is said that DeLillo is funny, but his is the funniness of peculiarity, not mirth. It is, more precisely, the terrible irony of the lone metaphysician, rising to a keening intensity as he registers the black holes in the world about him. In White Noise, as in all his novels, DeLillo absorbs the jargon of myriad disciplines and reprocesses them in a terminal deadpan. His is a hard-edged, unsmiling kind of satire. It is not user friendly. And where Thomas Berger, for example, trains the same kind of heightened sensibility on low-down Americana, setting loose an antic concatenation of events that unravels the world and triggers a resistless cycle of repercussions (this is what happens when Archie Bunker makes a pass at Clytemnestra), DeLillo has no time for anarchic pratfalls, Aristophanic gambits, non sequiturs. His humor is pitch black. The National Cancer Quiz is on television. The local college offers courses on "The Cinema of Car Crashes." On family outings, Gladney reads Mein Kampf in the neighborhood Dunkin' Donuts.

Just as DeLillo's characters are often not people so much as energies or eccentricities with voices, just as his suburbia is a crowded set of signs fit for a moonlighting Roland Barthes, so his speech is not normal discourse as much as a kind of rhetoric pitched high, a collection of phantom sentences, a chorus of texts without contexts. And his (charnel) house style has the cool metallic sleekness of a hearse: it is all polished angles, black lines, sunless planes. No wasted motion. No extraneous matter. No scraps of the regular world. Words in DeLilloese are stripped dry, sheared clean, given a deadly precision:
"Am I going to die?"

"Not as such," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Not in so many words."

It is this stark tonelessness that accounts for the terrible beauty of much of his writing. DeLillo does not put spin on his words; he leaves them hanging—weightless, somber things full of density and gravity. Disconnected, theirs is the kind of bare, brooding blankess that suggests not numbness so much as mystery, a world not empty of meaning, but too full of it, electrically supercharged. The most conspicuous tic in a DeLillo novel, indeed, is to end chapters with a paragraph consisting of nothing but a single sentence:
"Panasonic."
"I am the false character that follows the name around."
"Who will die first?"
Grist for a paranoid or a nihilist, the words simply stand there in space, mute, momentous, eerie as the pillars of Stonehenge.

DeLillo's other characteristic device is to put together words and rhythms into patterns, sequences, escalating cadences that build a mood and gather momentum and pick up in time a hypnotic and heart-stopping intensity. They turn into riffs, disquisitions, revved-up harangues. They move with the even, pounding purposefulness of footfalls down an alleyway.

This dazzle of Promethean language is largely consecrated to a single driving theme: the rising struggle between tribalism and technology. DeLillo's novels worry and worry at humanity's fight with science; DeLillo's characters are caught between the spirits of their ancestors and the gods of their computer world. The courses in "Eating and Drinking" he satirizes are no idle joke; in Gladney's world, primal instincts are threatened by a conception of progress that would transform men from animals into machines. "The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear," Gladney tells his wife. Science and fear, those are the antagonists in White Noise; we need our fear to defeat a science that tries to conquer fear. And the most potent instrument in this contest, the original—and aboriginal—martial art, is language. DeLillo is fascinated with the ways in which language creates and re-creates the world. Names nail down slippery identities; chants mass together crowds into forces stronger even than technology; language is a way, perhaps the only way, of making connections, an ordered system that can withstand the entropic pressure of the world at large. (Like Pynchon, DeLillo everywhere seeks out networks, circuits, codes, connections; and, like Pynchon, he knows that the man who finds connections everywhere is a paranoid.) Words, in the end, make up the fabric of our beings (and so the assurance that Gladney is not dying "in so many words" knells with particular plangency).

Above all, language, for DeLillo, is like fear: it is all we have of certainty, and of humanity. In this novelist's (largely verbal) universe, words are treated as archaeological fragments that can help us recover something of a more primitive and so more human past. Words are runes, atavistic relics, talismans with something of the sacred about them. Language is ritual; language is liturgy. It is no coincidence that the scenes from DeLillo's fiction that hum in the memory are virtuoso set pieces fashioned out of nothing but syllables: the conquest in The Names in which the protagonist makes love to an unwilling woman just by mouthing words to her in a crowded Athens restaurant; the episode in White Noise in which two professors deliver, simultaneously and in the same room, lectures on Elvis and Hitler, their words and ideas chiming and separating as in some verbal stereo system. At his most reverberant DeLillo at once explores and embodies the power, the fear of sound: recitation, repetition, incantation, words as rough magic, a way of making spells.

At times, perhaps inevitably, DeLillo's rhythms overpower him, acquire a life of their own, race so fast that they overthrow the meaning they are meant to carry. The minute Gladney is given a gun, he thinks of it as "a secret, ... a second life, a second self, a dream, a spell, a plot, a delirium." Also concealed in the runaway rhetoric is the deeper liability of seeing eternity in a grain of sand: DeLillo and his characters are so eager to read the world, to invest it with significance, that they come on occasion to seem overanxious. Hardly has Gladney begun to rummage through the trash than he is off again: "Is garbage so private? Does it glow at the core with personal heat, with signs of one's deepest nature, clues to secret yearnings, humiliating flaws? What habits, fetishes, addictions, inclinations? What solitary acts, behavioral ruts?" His atmospherics stronger than his aphorisms, DeLillo occasionally builds up menace without meaning, is about profundity rather than full of it, becomes—in a word—portentous. The price he pays for his hubristic ambition is an intermittent bout of pretension; manuals for Zen and the art of emotional maintenance, his books mass-produce fortune cookies along with their koans.

Perhaps the oddest and most enduring mystery of DeLillo's remarkable novels is that, though preoccupied with plotting, they are themselves ill-plotted; portraits of a mind as searching, driven and ceaselessly vagrant as the voice in a Beckett novel, they have trouble with resolutions. Such, perhaps, are the treacheries of a Melvillean course. For DeLillo is determined to take on inquiries that cannot be concluded, to make challenges that cannot be met (just as Gladney resolves to wrestle with the riddle of the Holocaust while his colleagues content themselves with deconstructing detergent jingles, soda bottles, and bubble gum). Writing of the unspeakable, DeLillo is fascinated with the unanswerable. "Is a symptom a sign or a thing? What is a thing and how do we know it's not another thing?" "What is electricity? What is light?" "What is dark?" "How does a person say good-bye to himself?" The questions keep coming and coming, pushing the reader back to metaphysical basics, mocking the answering machine, refuting artificial intelligence, mimicking the manner of a child who goes instantly to the heart of the matter, and with it the heart of darkness.

Next to DeLillo's large and terrifying talent, most modern fiction seems trifling indeed. A connoisseur of fear, he writes novels that leave a chill in one's bones. At the same time, however, it is always difficult to tell what he is about, beyond fear, emptiness, the dark. He knows his data cold; he addresses the great themes with uncommon courage (and so, at moments, heroic presumption and folly); his skills are astonishing. But where is he going, what can he do, with them? Imprisoned, it sometimes seems, within the four walls of his obsessions, he keeps on, in a sense, writing the same book, simply carrying his medicine bag of tricks and theme into a different genre, a new language, with every novel: college football or rock-'n'-roll, science fiction or international business or the academy. Thirteen years ago, his second novel End Zone sounded many of the same notes of foreboding that toll through White Noise: film clips of hurricanes and tornadoes; some all-American boys with names like "Hauptfuhrer," others burdened by an obscure need to master German; the consoling, earth-bound magnetism of the fat; classes in "the untellable."

For all that, however, White Noise remains a far greater book than End Zone, in large part because it is something more than cold and curious reason; it offsets its existential shivers with a domestic strength that is touching and true. In the midst of all the Pandoran currents and forces that pulse through the dark is a family that is vulnerable, warm bodies that turn to each other for shelter. Gladney wards off the power of the unknown by holding onto his adored wife at night; his unquiet mind is grounded, and uplifted, when he gazes upon the simple calm of his offspring—"Watching children sleep makes me feel devout, part of a spiritual system. It is the closest I can come to God." The professor's fears for his children as they move through a world of dangers are reminiscent, perhaps, of John Irving's Undertoad. But where Irving was coy and ingratiating, DeLillo is serious and moving. It is a shock to learn after reading his book that DeLillo has no children. All his terrors, his affections, are imagined. DeLillo can keep one up at night.