White Noise

What’s the book?
Our third Book Worth a Look is Don DeLillo’s White Noise, another 1985 novel and the book that won that year’s National Book Award: quite a year for literature was 1985! White Noise earned such high praise because of its relevant and altogether as-hilarious-as-it-is-recognizable saturation with the absurdity of the post-modern world. We recommend books that are often overlooked, usually because of their relative recency, and this masterpiece, and DeLillo’s first big hit, definitely fits the bill. In fact, perhaps the most compelling thing about this book is its foresight. Although it was written more than twenty years ago, its hauntingly but humorously realistic treatment of the Information Age remains quite relevant.

What’s it about?

The plot follows Jack Gladney, a university professor, through a ridiculous chain of events involving biochemical scares, marriage problems, and over-informed children. The tone of the story walks a fine line between depressingly serious and mockingly satirical: Jack and his wife are each others’ fourth spouse. Et cetera. Jack Gladney and his wife are horribly afraid of death, and as contemporary people are wont to do, Mrs. Jack Gladney seeks a drug to solve this anxiety. When a “toxic event” strikes the university town, the unquenchable angst it causes spurs a chain of events (we apologize for the double use of this word in the sentence; we were unable to come up with a different way of phrasing things [sometimes, LitHuman is lazy too]) involving this drug that challenges Jack’s marriage and illustrates the utter blandness of his world

Why should you read it?

Our third BWaL, like the second Book Worth a Look and the first, continues a rather post-modern trend of being interesting — for White Noise, the interest comes in the form of humorous satire — while still being literarily relevant. These novels are able to do this because they deal with issues that have not exactly gone away since their publishing. White Noise is a terrific example of a work that retains its pertinence even in these later stages of the Information Age. Complete with the post-modern inclusion of occasional random lists of all-things-mundane-and-contemporary, the novel deserves the April 30th spot because it challenges an array of issues from consumerism to sensationalism in a humorous and yet not heavy-handed way. That is really all there is to say without giving away what can only be truly experienced by reading this Book Worth a Look.