Recommendations
Books Like White Noise
What to read after White Noise by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985) is the great American novel of postmodern anxiety — Jack Gladney's fear of death, the supermarket, the television, the chemical cloud, the drug that is supposed to make it better. If you were drawn to its dark comedy and its understanding that contemporary life is organized around denying the thing everyone knows, these novels will find you in the same place.
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The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
The Lambert family and what the American century built and unmade — the most important American novel about domestic American life after White Noise; Franzen is in direct conversation with DeLillo's generation, and The Corrections carries the cultural critique of White Noise into the post-Cold War suburban family drama
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Libra
by Don DeLillo
DeLillo's novel of the Kennedy assassination — Lee Harvey Oswald as protagonist, history as conspiracy, language as the medium in which power operates invisibly; the best companion to White Noise in his career and his most formally controlled novel
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Underworld
by Don DeLillo
DeLillo's most ambitious novel — an American epic moving backward from 1992 to 1951, structured around a baseball and the Cold War; very long and very dense, but essential for readers who want the full scope of DeLillo's vision of America as a society organized around waste, violence, and the management of anxiety
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Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
The great American satirical novel of the generation before DeLillo — Heller and DeLillo share the dark comedy of institutions that serve death while claiming to serve life; reading White Noise as a civilian update of Catch-22 is one productive way into the novel
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Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
The Wheelers in 1950s Connecticut — an earlier and less formally experimental version of the same subject: what suburban American life does to people who believed its promises; White Noise is a richer and stranger book, but Revolutionary Road is the direct ancestor
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Less
by Andrew Sean Greer
Arthur Less, a failed novelist, traveling the world to avoid his ex-boyfriend's wedding — the most recent American comic novel to approach the same territory as White Noise: mortality, failure, and the absurdity of the self; lighter in tone, but the Pulitzer Prize winner uses comedy to say the same things DeLillo does through satire
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens the butler traveling across England reconsidering his life in service to a Nazi sympathizer — DeLillo and Ishiguro share an interest in characters who have organized their lives around a denial that the reader can see from the outside; different in period and setting but the same fundamental situation
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Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Students at a strange English boarding school who slowly understand what their lives are for — the other great contemporary novel about the denial of mortality; where White Noise uses satire and cultural noise to show how American society avoids the fact of death, Ishiguro uses his students' extraordinary docility to show what that avoidance costs
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