White Noise is a novel by Don DeLillo.
Finished on: 12.5.2015

Plot:
Jack Gladney is a professor for Hitler Studies at college.He is the expert in his field and as a big conference on the topic is approaching, he finally starts to take German lessons – something that he has never successfully managed to learn. Jack lives with his fourth wife in his fifth marriage, Babette, and together they raise several children from their respective previous relationships. Both Jack and Babette are afraid of death, even before there is a rail accident in their area which leads to a toxic spill and disrupts their lives and routines.

White Noise is pretty exhausting to read. Sometimes it’s exhausting in a good way, but more often the novel is faithful to its own title too much and dwindles down to white noise itself.

I think the biggest problem I had was that the topic itself doesn’t really touch me that much: fear of death. Of course I don’t want to die and I hope that it will take a long time until I will but it’s not really something that dominates my life. Maybe because I’m still rather young, maybe because my generation doesn’t fear death as much as not being able to achieve and do everything we want to achieve and do before death catches up with us.

Or maybe it’s just because in the beginning of the novel I didn’t see the fear of death everywhere, as the back of the book suggested. Later on it becomes explicit, but in the beginning the only thing that seemed to be an indication for that particular interpretation was that Babette and Jack talking about who will die first. But since both don’t want to be the second person to die, I’d rather say that it was a fear of loneliness and grief more than a fear of death.

Be that as it may, DeLillo obviously set out to write important literature (although “Hitler Studies” seems like a cheap grab for attention more than anything else) – and sometimes that is most keenly and not exactly positively felt. Everything is extremely stylized and a whole lot of work and that work doesn’t always pay off as much as it should. Sometimes though, that stylization has an eerie effect, especially the ads that quoted, at first seemingly randomly, throughout the entire book. There the brilliant writer I expected DeLillo to be (because of his reputation) really makes himself seen.

But those moments were too few for me to really like or even appreciate the book a whole lot.

Summarizing: Not my thing.