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PARTISAN REVIEW
A CONNOISSEUR OF FEAR
WHITE NOISE. By
Don Delillo.
Vlking·Penguln, Inc. $16.95.
Writing of death , Don DeLillo takes one's breath away.
A private man issuing a strangely private kind of fiction, he is the
closest thing we have to an Atomic Age Melville. That rarest of birds,
a novelist on fire with ideas - and an outlaw epistemologist to boot–
he uses his fictional excursions as occasions to think aloud in shad–
owed sentences, speak in modern tongues, plumb mysteries , fathom
depths . In book after cryptic book, DeLillo circles obsessively around
the same grand and implacable themes-language , ritual , breakup,
death . How to make sense of randomness or piece together identity?
How, in a centrifugal world of relativity, to steady oneseif with abso–
lutes? How, in the end , to get across the untellable?
The DeLillo universe is an ordinary world transfigured by ex–
traordinary concerns , a quotidian place seen in the terrifying white
light of eternity . Thus
White Noise
is furnished with all the suburban
props of the all-American novel: an amiably rumpled middle-aged
professor, his plump earth-motherly wife, bright children from scat–
tered marriages , a nuclear family in a pleasant postnuclear home.
Their story is unlikely, however, to be mistaken for a fifties sitcom.
The academic , Jack Gladney, teaches Advanced Nazism at the
College-on-the-Hill; the matriarch leads adult education classes in
posture ; Gladney's three exwives all have ties with the intelligence
community; and the fourteen-year-old eldest child of the household ,
Heinrich Gerhardt, has both a receding hairline and a philosophical
bent - on his first appearance in the novel, he solemnly proclaims,
"There's no past, present or future outside our own mind . The so–
called laws of motion are a big hoax. Even sound can trick the mind."
Nothing in DeLillo's world is casual, nothing free of occult sig–
nificance. Dark forces swirl around the bright, plastic artifacts of
Anytown , U .S.A., and the country seems nothing but a gleaming
library of portents . Bills , bank statements , the brand names of cars
are recited as if they were mantras; tabloids are read as fragments
from an American Book of the Dead; the television is consulted as a
mystic oracle in the dark. The very title of the book, we learn , refers
to death: the static of our lives is thus the sound track of our dying.
Yet of all the subversions of the everyday, the nightmare turns
on the American Dream, the most unnerving comes when the Glad-
