White Noise
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White Noise by Don DeLillo is about death. It’s completely preoccupied with the subject. The theme of each chapter? Death. The central focus of character relationships? Death. The plot-driver? Death.
White noise has “equal intensity at different frequencies”. I’m not going to pretend to fully understand what that means, but I get it as a metaphor-- death is a pervasive, inevitable force that informs our thoughts and actions whether we like it or not. Its existence is always subconsciously lingering there because it affects everyone indiscriminately and the timing is random.
Ok so this book is not very uplifting, but it does have a poetic lilt. Don DeLillo has a poetic lilt- say that five times fast. The main character, Jack, in his obsession with death, toys with many beautiful and soothing truths about the universe. Yeah, he also explores the darkside of humanity, but there are small moments that feel insightful and so specifically relatable. He is a remarkable self-aware narrator. It is a beautiful experience to read something and immediately identify with it-- to see your inner feelings expressed in an exact way.
DeLillo’s dialogue is blunt (his conversations with his kids are hilarious IMO) and his entire story has an existential undertone, so an ominous, disquieting tension builds up over 300 pages. The ending, however, felt too surreal for my liking. The tension built and I didn’t like the release. The whole book felt *weird* in that it was difficult to parse between what was literally happening and what was being overblown for figurative reasons. I dug it until the end, when I couldn’t discern at all what truly happened. My narrator was spiritually deprived and philosophically earnest, so I wanted to see how he would cope, but I felt distanced from him in the end. White Noise receives 3 out of 5 flames.
