Reading Order
White Noise Reading Order
Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985) is the defining American novel about consumer culture and death anxiety — a darkly comic, philosophically dense satire about Jack Gladney, chair of the Hitler Studies department at a small Midwestern college, his wife Babette, their blended family, and the 'Airborne Toxic Event' that forces them to confront their deepest terror: the fear of death that the white noise of American consumer society is designed to drown out.
Where to start
White Noise
Complete White Noise Book List
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White Noise
Don DeLillo·1985·DeLillo's most accessible and beloved novel, winner of the National Book Award. Start here. - Buy
Underworld
OptionalDon DeLillo·1997·DeLillo's masterpiece — a vast, 800-page novel following a cast of American characters from the 1951 Giants-Dodgers baseball game (and its simultaneous news: the Soviet Union has detonated a nuclear bomb) through the Cold War to the present. The most ambitious American novel of the 1990s. Read after White Noise.
White Noise — Frequently Asked Questions
What is White Noise about?
White Noise follows Jack Gladney — who founded and chairs the department of Hitler Studies at a fictional small Midwestern college called College-on-the-Hill — through a single academic year, with three main sections: 'Waves and Radiation' (the Gladney family's daily life in their consumer paradise, surrounded by supermarkets, television, and the white noise of American culture), 'The Airborne Toxic Event' (the family's evacuation when a chemical plant disaster releases a toxic cloud that forces Jack to confront his mortality directly), and 'Dylarama' (the aftermath, in which Jack discovers that his wife Babette has been secretly obtaining an experimental drug called Dylar from a black market source — a drug that supposedly suppresses the fear of death). The novel is simultaneously a realistic family drama, a dark satire of American consumer culture, and a philosophical investigation of death anxiety, media, and the relationship between information and meaning.
What is the significance of 'white noise' in the novel?
White noise in the novel operates on multiple levels. Literally, it refers to the background noise of American consumer culture — television, radio, supermarkets, traffic — that DeLillo depicts as the sonic wallpaper of postmodern life. Metaphorically, it represents the way American consumer culture drowns out the existential signal of death and meaninglessness: the supermarket's abundance, the television's endless programming, the flow of brand names and products that DeLillo lists with incantatory repetition throughout the novel ('Toyota Celica'; 'Coke is it') are all forms of white noise that prevent Americans from confronting the fact of death. The Airborne Toxic Event — the visible, named, catastrophic pollution that forces the Gladneys to evacuate — is the white noise of consumer culture made suddenly and terrifyingly visible: the by-product of the industrial system that produces all the goods that generate all the white noise.
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