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PARTISAN REVIEW
ceaselessly vagrant as the voice in a Beckett novel, they have trouble
with resolutions. Such, perhaps, are the treacheries of a Melvillean
course. For DeLillo is determined to take on inquiries that cannot be
concluded, to make challenges that cannot be met (just as Gladney
resolves to wrestle with the riddle of the Holocaust while his colleagues
content themselves with deconstructing detergent jingles, soda bot–
tles, and bubble gum) . Writing of the unspeakable , DeLillo is fasci–
nated with the unanswerable. "Is a symptom a sign or a thing? What
is a thing and how do we know it's not another thing?" "What is elec–
tricity? What is light?" "What is dark?" "How does a person say good–
bye to himself?" The questions keep coming and coming, pushing the
reader back to metaphysical basics, mocking the answering machine,
refuting artificial intelligence, mimicking the manner of a child who
goes instantly to the heart of the matter, and with it the heart of
darkness.
Next to DeLillo's large and terrifying talent, most modern fic–
tion seems trifling indeed. A connoisseur of fear, his novels leave a
chill in one's bones. At the same time, however, it is always difficult
to tell what he is about, beyond fear, emptiness, the dark. He knows
his data cold; he addresses the great themes with uncommon courage
(and so, at moments, heroic presumption and folly); his skills are
astonishing. But where is he going, what can he do, with them? Im–
prisoned, it sometimes seems, within the four walls of his obsessions,
he keeps on, in a sense, writing the same book, simply carrying his
medicine bag of tricks and themes into a different genre, a new lan–
guage, with every novel: college football or rock-'n'-roll, science fic-
tion or international business or the academy. Thirteen years ago,
his second novel
End Zone
sounded many of the same notes of fore-
boding that toll through
White Noise:
film clips of hurricanes and tor–
nadoes; some all-American boys with names like "Hauptfuhrer,"
others burdened by an obscure need to master German; the consol-
ing, earth-bound magnetism of the fat; classes in "the untellable."
For all that, however,
White Noise
remains a far greater book
than
End Zone,
in large part because it is something more than cold
and curious reason; it offsets its existential shivers with a domestic
strength that is touching and true. In the midst of all the Pandoran
currents and forces that pulse through the dark is a family that is
vulnerable, warm bodies that turn to each other for shelter. Gladney
wards off the power of the unknown by holding onto his adored wife
at night; his unquiet mind is grounded, and uplifted, when he gazes
upon the simple calm of his offspring-"Watching children sleep
