White Noise

[sawyl]

Inspired by last week's reading and goaded by doctor_squale, I decided that the time had finally come to tackle Don Delillo's White Noise, a brilliant post-modern classic.

The first section of the book, Waves and Radiation, introduces the main character, his family and their absurd existence. Jack, known professionally as J.A.K. Gladney, is chair of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. He has a light teaching load — the only course he still runs is Advanced Nazism, which is only open to suitable serious and qualified majors — which gives him ample time to go for conversational rambles with his friend Murray and to fret over his large and extended family.

And what a family. Jack's relationship with his eldest son, Heinrich, is largely one of constant bafflement. He wants to support his son but everything he seems to do undermine his intent so, of necessity, he finds himself standing back only to make things worse. Plus he's worried that Heinrich, at 14, is losing his hair. The other children are similarly curious, from Steffie, who is addicted to the smell of burning toast, to Denise who spends all her time searching through medical dictionaries trying to identify the mysterious medication she seems to have convinced herself her mother is taking. The youngest child, Wilder, is a both a source of consolation and worry: Jack finds it comforting to watch Wilder sleep, but less so when he embarks on a prolonged bout of crying or decides to ride his tricycle across a major road. It's surely deeply significant that, of all the characters, Wilder is the only one unable to speak.

The first section is probably the funniest part of the book, with dazzling moments of pure comedy. There's a particularly wonderful moment when Jack shows up at one of Murray's lectures to lend moral authority to Murray's project to create a department of Elvis studies. With Murray throwing out facts about Elvis' life, Jack stands up and starts counterpointing them with facts about Hitler. The two men swirl around it each other, riffing off each others ideas until Jack's countersubject takes over and finishes Murray's lecture with a grand flourish; afterwards, he glows with enthusiasm about what he has done: he has lend the minor figure of Murray's Elvis some of the gloss and authority of his greater totem, Hitler. Indeed, a lot of the humour comes from the way that Jack, hopeless Jack, draws on the authority of Hitler to help him live his uncertain life — he constantly carries Mein Kampf around with him; when his ex-wife asks him about his subject he replies that Hitler is, "Fine, solid, dependable." The fixed point in Jack's life.

The section section, The Airborn Toxic Event, begins when a tank of Nyodene D is puncture in a train accident. Jack's bafflement at the intrusion of this bizarre event into his life is wonderful. He's convinced that he won't have to evacuate his home, because that sort of thing just doesn't happen to people like him; he's chair of Hitler studies and when was the last time you saw an evacuee on TV who was some sort of academic? Never, right? So there's no way that he and his family are going to have evacuate. But, of course, they do.

Directed to go and stay at a boyscout hut, Jack has to deal with his children's psychosomatic symptoms of Nyodene poisoning — amusingly, these vary depending on whether or not the children have heard about the latest set of symptoms from the radio. The chaotic evacution centre is being run by SIMUVAC, a project intended to created optimal simulated evacuations. The SIMUVAC people aren't really terribly interested in real evacuations and instead focus on ways in which they can use the real evacuation to inform and improve their next simulation, because that's what their project is designe to do.

The final section, Dylarama, focuses on Jack and Barbette's relationship after the Event as they both become increasingly obsessive. Finally the barriers breakdown and they discuss their morbid fears of death and the tricky question of which of them will die first. After complicated series of events involving grey market drugs with post-modern side effects that cause words and events to become confused, Jack consults Murray, as a fearless New Yorker, for advice which causes events to cascade and career out of control. The book ends with the confusion induced by a rearrangement of the goods in the supermarket.

On every level White Noise works for me. I love the crazy, snarky humour. I love the characters. I love the way the cozy world of Blacksmith is shattered by the Airborn Toxic Event and Jack's wonderful, plausible, denial. I love the relationship between Jack and his kids, the way that they sustain him and confound him in equal parts. I love the relationship between Jack and Barbette, especially the moments when Baba reveals to him that she has unanticipated depths, Jack responds by telling her that, "Barbette is not someone who would do this."

I thought the whole fear of death theme worked particularly well. That Jack and Barbette fear death so much is a feature of their failure to understand what gives meaning to their lives: Jack's Hitler studies, Barbette posture classes and reading sessions. Their real meaning comes from those around them — they partially acknowledge this by admitting that they don't want to die until after their kids have left home — and by the choices they make. Which, perhaps, explains why Murray's advice to Jack pretty much amounts to carpe diem.