White Noise

DeLillo is a true American oddball, in the best way, and one who knows it, too. His unique skill lies in the casual ways he injects maximally absurd details and arcs into what could have been an ordinary or straightforward story in lesser hands. This book immediately thrusts you into a world where “Hitler Studies” is not only a normal field of academic research but a respected one. The comedy, the laughs, they are there and in spades, but never (I think, anyway) intended to read as purely comedic, both in general and within the logic of the story in particular. He has an ease regardless of how tragic or painful the material is which requires a difficult balancing act that for most would tip towards callousness or bitter mockery. His words and ideas and themes are no doubt sordid, but you don’t come away from every reading session feeling sleazy. Few have had such an early and complete grasp on the modern condition that results from informational overload and the interspersing (or constant streaming, depending on the perspective taken) of and resulting desensitization towards advertisements. Commercialization, yes, being convinced of things we needn’t be convinced of, yes, normalization of anything reducible to buying and selling, yes—but most of all, the hollowing out, the forgetting who we are because we’re always being told to be something or that we already are that thing, the emptiness of a God who has orders strictly confined to pecuniary and base interests, the searching for something but no longer knowing how to search or what to search for, the fallacy that anything can ever just be white noise, the wrongness of believing you can let something live in the background of every moment and not be affected or captured by that thing. Kendrick Lamar on “Feel” aptly describes the essence of what this book gets at: “The feelin’ of an apocalypse but nothin’ is awkward.” We numb and pacify and stuff our brains with this and that, we eliminate total silence, and we do this without thinking of it as a buffer between us and the material realities of existence. We (at least at the time) have unwittingly separated ourselves from death with cheap and thin nothingness, and wonder why something feels off and out of place or somehow unsatisfactory or that there’s a greater story being told or that we’re disconnected from something we can’t name or even be sure is or ever was real. Total silence, always there, never destroyed—the core point is white noise can distract and distance all it wants but never accomplish what it sets out to do and cannot replace or drown out the soundless scream of life happening all around us at all times.

One of the stranger books I’ve read, but then I also couldn’t put it down. I think this one will stick with me a while.
And, I finally learned where the band Airborne Toxic Event got their name!

This is an actually funny satire, that's also interesting and true. I'm very hard to please on the humor front, and I still didn't laugh out loud, but I found myself smirking and smiling a lot as I read along. I really enjoyed the exploration of how people do or don't conceptualize death. The main characters are a professor and his wife who are fearful of death to an obsessive degree. I definitely recommend this one.

The second book we read in the Postmodernism course I took where we discussed authors before/after 9/11.