White Noise by Don DeLillo

Disclaimer: I am very much a product of go-go 80s Reaganaut commercialism. I owned the Rainbow Brite dolls created by Hallmark. I nagged my mom to get whichever sugary cereal had the best cartoon mascot. I drank the Kool-Aid--literally!

So maybe that's part of why White Noise, the latest Jacob-Katy book club selection, didn't reach me as deeply as it should have. As a criticism of America's hysterical consumer culture, the book feels like familiar territory. What must have seemed novel to DeLillo and his readers in the early 1980s (pre-internet, pre-cable, pre-Oprah) now feels kinda stale. We know we're surrounded by a hum of constant radiation--we just don't seem to care anymore. Being alarmed about it seems almost quaint and Cold War-ish, like Yakov Smirnoff.

DeLillo chooses to do a sendup of a "normal" family by making his protagonists as wacky as possible: Jack, the Hitler-scholar father; pill-popping fourth wife who reads erotic poetry aloud; ex-wives who all happen to be spies; and an assortment of kids who do super-precocious things like research prescription drugs and have glib opinions about consumerism. They're a boisterous, name-brand-buying crew that functions pretty normally until there's a chemical spill in town, and all the suburban "white noise" overwhelms them. In the resulting panic there's a lot of "I told you so" going on, from the teenage son and Jack's smug fellow professor, who studies Elvis Americana and looks down on suburbia.

By the time the cloud hits, any chance at literary subtlety goes out the window. If DeLillo let the reader infer anything, the book would be more enjoyable. But alas, he does not. Want to parody society's obsession with death? Have two characters argue over who's more afraid to die. Of course. I'm down with absudity, but it's done so self-consciously here. There's no challenge to figuring anything out, because there's always a character doing it for you.

DeLillo's writing is technically fine, and he has some really great descriptive stuff going on. Like Jacob, I just found it hard to connect with any of it. Maybe I should take some Prozac for my apathy, and wash it down with some refreshing Diet Coke.