Death 'N' Things White Noise

By R.Z. Sheppard

Since Americana (1971), Don DeLillo has converted our national confusions into witty, imaginative fiction. End Zone, a resourceful handling of football and nuclear war, brought him wide and serious attention. But without bestseller sales figures or a dependable cult following, he has become something of a reviewer's writer, a provider of topical allegories ripe for explanation and interpretation. Great Jones Street confronted the void of celebrity, and Ratner's Star measured the gap between science and humanity. There were terrorists in Players, spies and pornography in Running Dog and cult killers in The Names.

White Noise features a cloud of toxic industrial waste, although the author's larger concern is with death as metaphor. As usual, DeLillo mixes black comedy with a ceremonious tone: "The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings." The whirly appendages belong to helicopters tracking the monster smudge over Iron City, a small industrial town and home of the College-on-the-Hill.

DeLillo has a knack for faculty follies. The school is well known for its department of Hitler studies, headed by Jack ("J.A.K.") Gladney, the novel's narrator. Students are also offered courses in popular culture, seminars in car crashes and cereal-box texts, a professor named Alfonse ("Fast Food") Stompanato and a teaching staff of New York emigres, "smart, thuggish, movie- mad, trivia-crazed . . . here to decipher the natural language of the culture, to make a formal method of the shiny pleasures they'd known in their Europe- shadowed childhoods."

Gladney's hustle works in reverse; instead of enhancing trivialities with phony significance, he reduces the century's paramount expression of evil to classroom entertainment. Getting a handle on his domestic arrangements is a little more difficult. The Gladneys are a parody of relationships resulting from multiple divorce. Stepchildren, half brothers and half sisters drift in and out of the household. One former wife is abroad with the CIA; another runs the business end of an ashram under the name Mother Devi. Talk is plentiful, but communication is illusive. "There must be something in family life that generates factual error," muses Jack. "Overcloseness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive."

Unrelieved worry about self-preservation is one of life's more depressing preoccupations. DeLillo illustrates this sad fact and attempts to lift the dread with satire and comic invention. An expert explains the poison cloud that threatens Iron City: "This is Nyodene D. A whole new generation of toxic waste. What we call state of the art." There are lampoons (if that is possible) of occult tabloids: "From beyond the grave, dead living legend John Wayne will communicate telepathically with President Reagan to help frame U.S. foreign policy. Mellowed by death, the strapping actor will advocate a hopeful policy of peace and love." In what may be regarded lightly as a plot, Gladney searches for the source of Dylar, an experimental drug that allegedly cures fear of death.

The "distinguished thing" yields to no potions or megadoses of prose. DeLillo's gifts are lavish, but his vision is a bit facile. The white noise of the title is electronic static forced into symbolic service as some sort of universal death rattle. Throughout, technology is depicted as the ominous messenger of our common fate; even the price scanners in supermarkets are spooky. Discovering malevolence in things and systems rather than in people is a little callow, especially when DeLillo's solemn moralizing overruns his comedy. Perhaps that is why, after eight books, he still seems like a writer making a debut.