Fabian's Reviews > White Noise

Two waves of strangeness collide in this ultra-wacky, Edward Albeeesque yarn of radiation via ultraconsumerism. There's the Gladney clan: a bunch of misfits straight out of Wes Anderson. Then there is the undertow of dread carried like a fog through wires and the air itself... something that interests the likes of filmmaker Cronenberg.

There is an obvious wit in the minutiae over-explained by the Gladneys. These Americans are as eccentric as they get, which is why the plot doesn't get old. The father is a professor of the very popular Hitler studies at a college in a college town. The children are all idiot savants. The mother is a weirdo. This imparts plenty of literary liberty to DeLillo.

I think that while this work is original, plenty of other stories (about alien invasions, paranoia born of technology, etc.) resemble it. I love the play/movie BUG because, similarly, it too relies on the claustrophobia inherent in the interactions with humanity and the delusions that one brain equals the world entire. Unlike "Bug," the characters here are too strange to be endearing. No, this is not required reading. (However) Yes, the atmosphere is well conceived and almost everything said and done can be open to reader's interpretation. It's precisely one of those books...