Have you read it? What do you think?

Have you read it? What do you think?

Also GOAT cover

It was fun for what it was but I can see why some people hated it. Things like Jack sardonically remarking on how "literary" what he was doing towards the end was might be way too "cute" for a lot of people to stomach.

beautiful book, one of the main criticisms that people make-- that dellilo's dialogues are a little slanted and awkard-- was something I never quite understood. When you watch a Cohen Bros. or Tarantino film, the dialogue is obviously and delightfully stylized; it becomes part of the book's central message and overall mood.

There are certain parts of this book that always stand out to me. Where we have the main character (whatever the fuck his name was) seeing the outline of his father-in-law during sunrise and the scene with the main character and his son watching a house burn down.

Didn't like it. Overwrought, too on the nose, melodramatic.

I cried when the father in law left.

From “A Reader’s Manifesto”

“Edgy” Prose

Not all contemporary writing is marked by the Proulx-McCarthy brand of obscurity. Many novels intimidate readers by making them wonder not what the writer is saying but why he is saying it. Here, for example, is the opener to Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985).

The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags, with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags—onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.

This is the sort of writing, full of brand names and wardrobe inventories, that critics like to praise as an "edgy" take on the insanity of modern American life. It's hard to see what is so edgy about describing suburbia as a wasteland of stupefied shoppers, which is something left-leaning social critics have been doing since the 1950s. Still, this is foolproof subject matter for a novelist of limited gifts. If you find the above shopping list fascinating, then DeLillo's your man. If you complain that it's just dull, and that you got the message about a quarter of the way through, he can always counter by saying, "Hey, I don't make the all-inclusive, consumption-mad society. I just report on it."

Of course the narrator, a professor called Jack Gladney, can't actually see what's inside the students' bags; he's just trying to be funny. So is there really a caravan of station wagons, or is that also a joke? How much of the above passage, for that matter, are we even supposed to bother visualizing? Similar questions nag at the reader throughout White Noise. We are no sooner introduced to Jack and his wife than their conversation marks them as paper-flat contrivances.

"It's the day of the station wagons." ...
"It's not the station wagons I wanted to see. What are the people like? Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters? Are the men in hacking jackets? What's a hacking jacket?"

No real person would utter those last two questions in sequence. DeLillo's characters talk and act like the aliens in 3rd Rock From the Sun, which would be fine if we weren't supposed to accept them as dead-on satires of the way we live now. The American supermarket is presented as a haven of womblike contentment, a place where people go to satisfy deep emotional needs. (In a New York Times interview after the novel's publication DeLillo elaborated on the theme by comparing supermarkets to churches.) This sort of patronizing nonsense is typical of Consumerland writers; someone should break the news to them that the average shopper feels nothing in a supermarket but the strong urge to get out again. White Noise also continues a long intellectual tradition of exaggerating the effects of advertising. Here Steffie, the narrator's young daughter, talks in her sleep.

She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant.

Toyota Celica.

A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform ... Whatever its source, the utterance struck me with the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence.

DeLillo has said that he wants to impart a sense of the "magic and dread" lurking in our consumer culture, but what a poor job he does of this! There is so little apparent wonder in the girl's words that only a metaphor drawn from recognizable human experience could induce us to share Jack's excitement. Instead we are told of an un-named name carved on a tablet in the sky, and in cuneiform to boot. The effect of all this is so uninvolving, so downright silly, that it baffles even sympathetic readers. It is left to real-life professors to explain the passage in light of what DeLillo has said in interviews and other novels about how people use words to assuage a fear of death. Cornel Bonca, of California State University, writes, "If we see Steffie's outburst as an example of the death-fear speaking through consumer jargon, then Jack's wondrous awe will strike us, strange as it may seem, as absolutely appropriate." A good novelist, of course, would have written the scene more persuasively in the first place. Far stranger things happen in Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls (1842), but we don't need an academic intermediary to argue their plausibility or to explain what Gogol was getting at..

In this excerpt from White Noise, Jack and his family go shopping.

In the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls—it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening.

Could the irony be any less subtle? And the tautology: mass, plenitude, number; well-being, contentment! The clumsy echoes: size, sizes; familiar, family; sense of, sense of; well-being, being! I wouldn't put it past DeLillo's apologists to claim that this repetition is meant to underscore the superfluity of goods in the supermarket. The fact remains that here, as in the Toyota Celica scene, the novel tries to convey the magical appeal of consumerism in prose that is simply flat and tiresome.
At least that paragraph is coherent. Most of the author's thoughts, regardless of which character is speaking them, take the form of disjointed strings of elliptical statements. This must be what satisfies critics that they are in the presence of a challenging writer—but more often than not "the dry shrivelled kernel," to borrow a line from Anne Brontë, "scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut." Here, for example, Jack Gladney tells a woman why he gave his child the name Heinrich.

"I thought it was forceful and impressive ... There's something about German names, the German language, German things. I don't know what it is exactly. It's just there. In the middle of it all is Hitler, of course."

"He was on again last night."
"He's always on. We couldn't have television without him."
"They lost the war," she said. "How great could they be?"
"A valid point. But it's not a question of greatness. It's not a question of good and evil. I don't know what it is. Look at it this way. Some people always wear a favorite color. Some people carry a gun. Some people put on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger, safer. It's in this area that my obsessions dwell."

So Gladney thinks there is something forceful about German names. This is such a familiar idea that we naturally assume DeLillo is going to do more with it. Instead he gives us a frivolous non sequitur about television, followed by a clumsy rehashing of the first point. If the narrator's obsessions dwell "in this area," shouldn't he be able to tell us something we don't know, instead of "Some people put on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger, safer"?

Another source of spurious profundity is DeLillo's constant allusions to momentous feelings and portents—allusions that are either left hanging in the air or are conveniently cut short by a narrative pretext. Jack ponders the clutter in his house: "Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful weight? There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding. They make me wary not of personal failure and defeat but of something more general, something large in scope and content." What is this something large in scope and content ? We are never told. Later Jack registers "floating nuances of being" between him and his stepdaughter. Similar phrases turn up throughout DeLillo's novels; they are perhaps the most consistent element of his style. In Underworld (1997) a man's mouth fills with "the foretaste of massive inner shiftings"; another character senses "some essential streak of self"; the air has "the feel of some auspicious design"; and so on. This is the safe, catchall vagueness of astrologists and palm readers. DeLillo also adds rhetorical questions or other disclaimers to throw his meaning out of focus. Here, to return to White Noise, is another of Jack's musings.

"We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot."
Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?

The first and third of those questions are easily answered; after all, we edge nearer death every time we do anything. So why, indeed, does Jack say this? Because DeLillo knew it would seem profoundly original to most of his readers. Then he added those questions to keep the critical minority from charging him with banality.
Interspersed with these ruminations we get long conversations of the who's-on-first? variety. These only highlight the sameness of the characters' speech. Young and old, male and female, all sound alike.

"What do you want to do?" she said.
"Whatever you want to do."
"I want to do whatever's best for you."
"What's best for me is to please you," I said.
"I want to make you happy, Jack."
"I'm happy when I'm pleasing you."
"I just want to do what you want to do."
"I want to do whatever's best for you."

And so on. To anyone who calls that excruciating, DeLillo might well respond, "That's my whole point! This is communication in Consumerland!" It isn't unlikely, considering how the dialogue loses its logic halfway through, that the whole thing was written only to be skimmed anyway. Like the bursts of brand names that occur throughout the text ("Tegrin, Denorex, Selsun Blue"), this is more evidence of DeLillo's belief—apparently shared by Mark Leyner, Brett Easton Ellis, and others—that writing trite and diffuse prose is a brilliant way to capture the trite and diffuse nature of modern life.

But why should we bother with Consumerland fiction at all, if the effect of reading it is the same queasy fatigue we can get from an evening of channel-surfing? Do we need writers like DeLillo for their insight, which rarely rises above the level of "some people put on a uniform and feel bigger"? Or do we need them for an ironic perspective that most of us acquired in childhood, when we first started sneering at commercials? Yes on both counts, according to the jurors of the National Book Award, who gave White Noise the nod in 1985. The novel's inflated reputation remains a clear signal that we should expect less from contemporary fiction than from books written in our grandparents' day. Just as it is now enough for a prose poet to be vaguely "evocative," it is enough for an intellectual writer to point our thoughts in a familiar direction. Jayne Anne Phillips praised White Noise in The New York Times in 1985 for choosing to "offer no answers" and instead posing "inescapable questions with consummate skill." She also said, "[The narrator of White Noise] is one of the most ironic, intelligent, grimly funny voices yet to comment on life in present-day America. This is an America where no one is responsible or in control; all are receptors, receivers of stimuli, consumers." In other words, this is an America that Andy Warhol began commenting on in the 1960s, and in far more coherent fashion. Warhol even wrote better, for God's sake. But then, where would Notable New Fiction be without the willing suspension of cultural literacy?

Most of DeLillo's admirers hedge their bets by praising his style—or, my favorite, his "analytic rigor" (Jay McInerney)—while offering only a phrase or two of textual evidence. Phillips at least had the guts to quote a lengthy excerpt from White Noise in which a character holds forth on the semiotics of—what else?—the supermarket.

"Everything is concealed in symbolism ... The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. Energy waves, incident radiation ... code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering ... Not that we would want to ... This is not Tibet ... Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die ... We don't have to cling to life artificially, or to death ... We simply walk toward the sliding doors ... Look how well-lighted everything is ... sealed off ... timeless. Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet ... Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don't die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think."