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Dorothea's Reviews > White Noise
White Noise
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Reading White Noise by Don DeLillo is the literary equivalent of 18 paranoid hours of non-stop channel surfing while chain-smoking and nursing a migraine in a smoggy, over-crowded city. On meth.
Do you want to know why this is one of the most important books of the 20th century? Because it's a good example of the postmodern simulacra, absurdist philosophy that plagued the latter half of the 20th century and still plagues us today. I felt bleak and empty for several days after reading this book, and I'm still recovering.
It had a lot of potential. It could have been a great commentary on life in a media-saturated society that worships safety and bright colors in the temples of grocery stores, a society that will suffocate in the toxic by-products of its own vain materialistic pleasures, conveniences and distractions.
But a great commentary would have been too meaningful and after all, this is the age of negation and disorder wherein everything is turned inside out, and to live fully without fear is to kill freely without hesitation. This is the age of futility wherein the best artists have to be indifferent or even hostile to supreme coherence and only depictions of anti-heroism will be praised and given National Book Awards.
DeLillo is a talented writer, but he wasted his talent in this work and missed an important opportunity to demand change. Don't get me wrong, I'm not upset with his depiction of a dystopic American setting. The Toxic Airborne Event was brilliant, timely and necessary, but he never asks his readers to take even a cursory look at the causes and consequences of our toxin-producing lifestyle. And it was right there! I also take issue with his demonic proposal that there is liberation to be found in murder, that there is no immortality, that important "psychic data" can be gleamed from commercials and television programs.
Yeah, I know, it's only fiction, yeah I know, he meant something else entirely, turn it inside out and upside down and this is what he really meant, have a Coke and a Dylar and put a bullet in my head, it's opposite era!
Do you want to know why this is one of the most important books of the 20th century? Because it's a good example of the postmodern simulacra, absurdist philosophy that plagued the latter half of the 20th century and still plagues us today. I felt bleak and empty for several days after reading this book, and I'm still recovering.
It had a lot of potential. It could have been a great commentary on life in a media-saturated society that worships safety and bright colors in the temples of grocery stores, a society that will suffocate in the toxic by-products of its own vain materialistic pleasures, conveniences and distractions.
But a great commentary would have been too meaningful and after all, this is the age of negation and disorder wherein everything is turned inside out, and to live fully without fear is to kill freely without hesitation. This is the age of futility wherein the best artists have to be indifferent or even hostile to supreme coherence and only depictions of anti-heroism will be praised and given National Book Awards.
DeLillo is a talented writer, but he wasted his talent in this work and missed an important opportunity to demand change. Don't get me wrong, I'm not upset with his depiction of a dystopic American setting. The Toxic Airborne Event was brilliant, timely and necessary, but he never asks his readers to take even a cursory look at the causes and consequences of our toxin-producing lifestyle. And it was right there! I also take issue with his demonic proposal that there is liberation to be found in murder, that there is no immortality, that important "psychic data" can be gleamed from commercials and television programs.
Yeah, I know, it's only fiction, yeah I know, he meant something else entirely, turn it inside out and upside down and this is what he really meant, have a Coke and a Dylar and put a bullet in my head, it's opposite era!
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
January 1, 2007
–
Finished Reading
May 3, 2008
– Shelved
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Ted
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rated it 5 stars
May 05, 2008 02:02PM
"Negative hipster assholes". Note to self: remove from Christmas card list.
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thanks for writing a well-thought out critique.
Look at all these peeps who like your review.Agreed that the middle (The Toxic Airborne Event) was the best part. This is the best DeLillo I've read -- I've found he's usually good, not great -- but I've heard good things on Mao II. Be sure to avoid his shorter works -- they're plotless little things (still charged at full novel price, mind you).
I think part of it is a generational gap, too. DeLillo writes the generation we came from.
I'am agreed with you, Colin: "I think part of it is a generational gap, too. DeLillo writes the generation we came from".
Thoughtful reviews like these are very helpful to those such as myself who are considering reading this book. Thanks for taking the time.
"Reading White Noise by Don DeLillo is the literary equivalent of 18 paranoid hours of non-stop channel surfing while chain-smoking and nursing a migraine in a smoggy, over-crowded city. On meth."Wait, this is a bad thing?
But seriously, I see where you're coming from. It's just that I happen to be an enormous fan of the postmodern simulacra.
all you are seeing is the mud here. Look up. Look up.
Just finished it, and was left with a similar feeling. Maybe this why DFW got to the point where he swore off irony, and went in search of sincerity, instead. Then again, look where he ended up. Seems he wasn't able to resolve the tension, either.And the style started to bug me after a while, too. I took it in stride at first, but it turned from "cute" to "tedious" about halfway through.
And yes, we get it, the artifice *is* the substance, and we're supposed to read the overly academic dialogs as parody, which is fine, as far as it goes. But Lord, it didn't need to go nearly as far as it did.
Maybe I'm just reading it 30 years too late. Maybe in 1985 this all seemed revalatory. Now it just seems a bit labored.
"Reading White Noise by Don DeLillo is the literary equivalent of 18 paranoid hours of non-stop channel surfing while chain-smoking and nursing a migraine in a smoggy, over-crowded city. On meth."
Damn, that's a good sell. I think I'll read it
Damn, that's a good sell. I think I'll read it
I hated it. It was terrible. I hoped the meth in your description meant it'd at least be interesting...
Madi wrote: "I hated it. It was terrible. I hoped the meth in your description meant it'd at least be interesting..."Thank you so much for coming back to add this comment! This response seriously cracked me up.
Poetry without strict meter or rhyme is hardly formless if it is done well, since I think the aesthetic of the early modernists, from Whitman through Eliot, Pound WC Williams and up through the present day was to model cadences on the inflections of real speech. Idealized speech, of course, but speech all the same as the inspiration for jettisoning the mathematical formulations that dominated serious poetry. There is something in the best of lines of non-rhyming, unmetered poems that gets at a number of verbal nuances that might otherwise not be available to a poet concerned with adhering to a conventional approach. As with metered verse, we have concern ourselves over which poets have an ear
Not often does one see simulacra used in a sentence.
I love it when people who don't know what the word "postmodern" means decide to use it as an insult.
@ C R E Mullins - dude, this book is the definition of a postmodern piece of literature lol
hmmm.... this book about postmodern life made me feel empty... just wish it had commentary about postmodern life in it!
