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A review by heyincendiary
White Noise by Don DeLillo
4.0
A fine book. Kind of preoccupied with themes that seem dated now. Delillo, in this one, seems interested in whether modern life (as of the 1970s) is always going to feel like it does. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say: it did, and it does. As a result, a jaded 2019 reader like myself finds the suspicion and unknowing of the '70s a little flat. But it's good in the way that it is novel to hear '60s futurists predict jetpacks, or nuclear power for the everyday family: it reminds you how much of the future you avoided, and you can determine from there whether you miss it. It also reminds you how much you failed to avoid. Call reading this book now an act of studying retrofuturism.
It has pacing issues. The "Airborne Toxic Event" that the book is ostensibly centered on lasts 50 pages or less. They're dizzying but ultimately, the weirdness you can see shining in through cracks BEFORE the Event never quite becomes the attitude of the rest of the book. That was a disappointment. So much of it reads like a suburban chronicler like Updike if he were recently returned from a hallucinogenic desert campout, wondering aloud about everything instead of just dissastisfied. People talk PAST each other, deliberately, mistaking mondegreens from each other and taking them into new, flawed directions. The dialogue's a real treat, as a result.
Lots of people pretend to be interested in how confusing and distressing modern life is. But Delillo takes it the confusion as a given, and chooses to mine it, to really space out the vertices and look at the angles of attack and determine exactly WHY and HOW, to a human brain geared for intimate connection, it should be distressing.
Then it ends with about 500 of the best words I've ever read in sequence. Just phenomenal clarity at the end. And then 25 words - the very very end - that fall flat.
It has pacing issues. The "Airborne Toxic Event" that the book is ostensibly centered on lasts 50 pages or less. They're dizzying but ultimately, the weirdness you can see shining in through cracks BEFORE the Event never quite becomes the attitude of the rest of the book. That was a disappointment. So much of it reads like a suburban chronicler like Updike if he were recently returned from a hallucinogenic desert campout, wondering aloud about everything instead of just dissastisfied. People talk PAST each other, deliberately, mistaking mondegreens from each other and taking them into new, flawed directions. The dialogue's a real treat, as a result.
Lots of people pretend to be interested in how confusing and distressing modern life is. But Delillo takes it the confusion as a given, and chooses to mine it, to really space out the vertices and look at the angles of attack and determine exactly WHY and HOW, to a human brain geared for intimate connection, it should be distressing.
Then it ends with about 500 of the best words I've ever read in sequence. Just phenomenal clarity at the end. And then 25 words - the very very end - that fall flat.