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shopping sprees. In her sleep a precocious adolescent murmurs her
Madison Avenue mantra, "Toyota Celica, Toyota Corolla, Toyota
Cressida," and her father, overhearing the chant, thinks: "Supranational
names, computer-generated, more or less universally pronounceable. Part
of every child's brain noise."
The father is Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies in a quiet
town. (Hitler again!) Gladney's colleague Murray Siskind, a Jew from
New York, wants "to immerse myself in American magic and dread,"
and gives popular courses in car crashes and comic books. When a poi–
sonous black cloud, which quickly acquires the television label, "The
Airborne Toxic Event," suddenly floats over the town and menaces its
inhabitants, Murray feels that his craving for dread has been satisfied. But
even when the cloud floats away, Gladney is sure he's ingested a lethal
dose of poison, and he becomes possessed not only by a fear of death but
by anxious certainty that disaster itself has become indispensable to
Americans afflicted with media overload: "We need an occasional catas–
trophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information . . .
Words, pictures ... Only a catastrophe gets our attention." His com–
ment recalls the football player Gary Harkness in DeLillo's second novel,
End
Zorle,
who cannot stop thinking about the prospect of nuclear war
and gorges his inflamed imagination with "words and phrases like ther–
mal hurricanes ... post-attack environment, stark deterrence, dose-rate
contours," and similar euphemisms. In
White Noise
the Gladney family
spends Friday evenings "steeped happily in disaster," silently staring at
horrible happenings on television while they eat "take-out Chinese."
Though DeLillo would seem to have conceived
White Noise
as a slyly
pointed domestic comedy, it's too barbed with sardonic irony to be
funny. The characters are two-dimensional cartoons, not credibly human,
and DeLillo's acute state of deracination deprives us of any facts about
the Gladneys beyond the stark immediacy of this moment, which turns
them into a grotesque inversion of Dick-and-Jane fables about middle–
class America. Indeed, in most of Delillo's novels the characters are
drawn as faceless ciphers devoid of recognizably ordinary physical and
emotional traits. Though they are unfailingly articulate, they are voices,
not persons - voices enacting DeLillo's demonic obsessions.
Only
in
Libra
does actuality intercede, enabling the characters of Lee
Harvey Oswald, his mother, and Jack Ruby to become fully realized and
believable. "All plots tend to move deathward": the theme is the
recurrent constant of DeLillo's work. Given his infatuation with covert
intrigue and dangerous secrets, it was inevitable that he would be drawn
to the assassination of President Kennedy and the short unhappy life of
Lee Harvey Oswald. How could DeLillo's conspiratorial imagination stay
