In our conversations leading up to seeing an LCD Soundsystem concert at Red Rocks, my friend Kyle brought up their song “new body rhumba”. Kyle had heard the song in the 2022 film White Noise, which was adapted from a book by the same name that he had also read. Kyle told me that in White Noise an American town is threatened by a poisonous chemical cloud they call “The Airborne Toxic Event”. Kyle and I casually discussed this morbid and fascinating idea while we worked together to test a new space laser.

Kyle had the book at home and loaned it to me to read. I naively assumed that he had enjoyed the book [1] and was recommending it to me. Here’s what I thought of White Noise by Don DeLillo.

Review

Not great, would not recommend (except maybe to my friend Sam), but at least it’s true to its name.

There isn’t a well-defined plot, nor do any of the characters grow in any way other than to become more unhinged as their relationships change. There’s a lot of things that happen that have no consequence, as if the whole book were white noise. “The Airborne Toxic Event” doesn’t occur until about halfway through the book and, when it does happen, it does not pull together a structured plot that stands for the remainder of the book as I had expected it to.

When you filter the story down to its signal, White Noise depicts the life of an anxious professor and his family. A professor with a shaky knowledge of a subject that is itself questionably valuable as a focus of study. The dominant motif of the book is a fear of death. Other motifs in the book are American society’s obsession with media, especially TV, pharmaceuticals, and fascination with catastrophes.

To the book’s credit, it does have some fun bits that satirize academia. It is also considered “a cornerstone example of postmodern literature” [2] so if you’re into that, you should read this book.

Notes

[1] I do think Kyle enjoyed White Noise in both its book and movie forms. It’s just that I think he enjoyed it in the way he enjoys things that are bad, like the movie Fateful Findings.

[2] I copied this phrase from Wikipedia 2023/September/23