White Noise, by Don DeLillo

White noise surrounds us every day of our lives. Radio, television, music, cell phones, internet, and other disparate forces join together to form a continuous din surrounding our every waking moment. This is the phenomenon underlying Don DeLillo’s darkly ironic novel White Noise, a slender satire which, in a roundabout way, underscores the need for faith in modern life.

White Noise centers on Jack Gladney, the “chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College-on-the Hill”. The first section ruminates on family life and academia. Gladney’s family, bizarrely functional, is comprised of his fourth wife, Babette, and their children and step children from their multiple previous marriages.

Henrich, a teenage boy, voices post-modern sophistry, ever questioning the nature of causation in a life where responsibility is ever mitigated by perspective, causation, and nature/nurture. He plays chess by mail with a mass-murderer and is sympathetically exhilarated by catastrophe; in a manner prescient of many people’s reaction to 9/11 (White Noise was published in 1985). Denise, 11, is continually vigilant for conspiracies, whether at a family or governmental level, and her paranoia is often substantiated by circumstances. Steffie, slightly younger than Denise, is sensitive, upset by situations on television which involve embarrassment for the characters involved, and seeks opportunities for victim-hood, going so far as to impersonate a dead body for disaster simulations. Wilder, 3, is usually silent, but his innocence and “total ego…[and] freedom from limits” make him a comforting persona for the members of the Gladney household.

The second section of the book chronicles the “airborne toxic event” which afflicts the family and their town. An industrial accident releases Nyodene D, a black gas, into the air, driving the families of the town from their homes into temporary refugee-ship. I won’t describe the third section, as it may prematurely reveal elements of the plot which are better developed by Delillo himself.

White Noise is marvelously descriptive of the landscape of modern life, particularly the fear of death itself, and how the specter of death haunts and leads humans to compromise their integrity in all fashions. Everyone in Gladney’s world seems to offer him a solution to the anxiety for our mortality, but each solution is only a reflection of their personal justification for their lifestyle, leading to individuals to suggest such bizarre solutions as sitting in a glass cage with snakes, practicing better posture, and committing murder.

DeLillo is often described as a postmodern novelist (a title he rejects, preferring the simple title “novelist”). White Noise does investigate the postmodern landscape, in which any framework for understanding the world is drowned in a torrent of information and other background noise, leading to an impossibility of knowing the truth.

He depicts faith most often as a superficial affectation used by the cynical or the deluded to achieve their ends in life, best exemplified by the faddish academics who crowd the fictional “College-on-the-Hill”. They are thoroughly convinced of the efficacy of their disciplines as a means of salvation from the evils in the world that their discipline crowds out everything else in their lives, leading them to study car crashes, Elvis, or Hitler as their connection to the power of the world, to avoid death by crouching beneath the aegis of a great person.

As a Christian, I believe DeLillo’s criticism of faith should be incorporated into evangelism. He is describing the reality each of us faces every day, and if Christians only offer a “quick-fix” or escape from anxiety, then we will necessarily be as irrelevant as every other source of information. If we can present our faith to non-Christians in a manner which is reasoned and has asked the “big questions” in life, then we can truly offer a better alternative to the hurting of this world.

In White Noise, DeLillo asks the questions each of us has asked, whether at a conscious or preconscious levels. He demonstrates throughout the book that if a person is not defined by his or her faith, then he or she will be defined by fear.