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neys pile into the family station wagon and head off on what resem–
bles a picnic . It is in fact a nuclear evacuation. The huge cloud of
escaped poison gas that drifts through the novel's central episode as
symbol, prophecy, white whale and man-made black death all in one
seems at first to be the stuff of routine sci-fi apocalypse (though, in a
harrowing, but not unexpected irony, this book came out at the same
time as the Bhopal disaster) . Yet the effect of the rogue chemical is
almost entirely internal. In the wake of the fugitive cloud , Gladney
brings up pulsing stars on a computer. What does that mean? The
poison has entered his system; he has come to incarnate death.
It is said that DeLillo is funny, but his is the funniness of pecu–
liarity, not mirth .
It
is , more precisely, the terrible irony of the lone
metaphysician, rising to a keening intensity as he registers the black
holes in the world about him. In
White Noise ,
as in all his novels,
DeLillo absorbs the jargon of myriad disciplines and reprocesses them
in a terminal deadpan . His is a hard-edged, unsmiling kind of satire.
It is not user friendly . And where Thomas Berger, for example, trains
the same kind of heightened sensibility on low-down Americana, set–
ting loose an antic concatenation of events that unravels the world
and triggers a resistless cycle of repercussions (this is what happens
when Archie Bunker makes a pass at Clytemnestra) , DeLillo has no
time for anarchic pratfalls, Aristophanic gambits, non sequiturs. His
humor is pitch black. The National Cancer Quiz is on television.
The local college offers courses on "The Cinema of Car Crashes."
On family outings, Gladney reads
Mein Kampf
in the neighborhood
Dunkin' Donuts .
Just as DeLillo's characters are often not people so much as en–
ergies or eccentricities with voices, just as his suburbia is a crowded
set of signs fit for a moonlighting Roland Barthes, so his speech is not
normal discourse as much as a kind of rhetoric pitched high, a collec–
tion of phantom sentences, a chorus of texts without contexts . And
his (charnel) house style has the cool metallic sleekness of a hearse: it
is all polished angles, black lines, sunless planes . No wasted motion.
No extraneous matter. No scraps of the regular world. Words in
DeLilloese are stripped dry, sheared clean, given a deadly precision :
"Am I going to die?"
"Not as such," he said.
"What do you mean?"
"Not in so many words."
