White Noise — A Delayed Existential Dread
Reviewing Don DeLillo’s Famous Book
Throughout reading White Noise, I felt no release or catharsis, until after I finished it entirely. This was a dissociative read — I never cried, I never felt much emotion. But then, after finishing it, I started tearing up the next day. The moments within the story hit harder once I was able to reflect on them without being suffocated by the atmosphere of the book itself. This is intentional, as the name implies, it’s meant to feel as though there’s consistent inescapable noise.
This has been a unique experience. I feel like I never really knew anything, and I’m okay with that. Most of my questions throughout the text were not answered for me, but rather were designed to stop being meaningful questions anymore.
I recommend this book, but with two huge caveats:
1. It’s a frustrating read for a very long time. Everything before the Airborne Toxic Event (around page 100) requires you to pay attention whilst not really caring — or vice versa.
2. The philosophical musings in the book are really poor, although I think intentionally. It pretends to be smart whilst sounding dumb, and then makes meaningful statements in the subtext, but it’s not obvious at first glance because it’s full of bloated half-baked philosophical statements.
With that said, there’s a lot to love about this book. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
Rating: 8.1/10
Warning: Spoilers Ahead
Disjointed Chapter Cadence
When you’re first met with this book, you’re given short, five-or-so page chapters. This is a fantastic way of easing you into the text. The first 105 pages of this book do not exactly contain a story, but rather a type of narrative architecture. It’s unconventional world building — we’re not exactly uncovering a new universe, but dialling into the one we already live in, orienting ourselves around relatively normal (albeit somewhat cold) individuals. It presents like a character-study, but it’s more of a tutorial on how to read the book’s events and descriptions, of which will become much more meaningful later.
The chapter cadence and size changes significantly at chapter 21. This chapter is the entire Toxic Airborne Event, making up about 60 pages. It’s meant to be read in one sitting. It feels heavy and real in a way nothing in the book previously does. It’s whiplash. By the time you make it to this chapter, you’re so starved for activity that it’ll feel like an overwhelming feast. Prior to this, the two biggest events were Wilder (one of the protagonist’s children) screaming for no discernible reason, and Babette (the protagonist’s wife) appearing on TV suddenly. These are non-events that feel huge because they’re surrounded by events of even lesser apparent significance.
The chapters after are more traditionally sized. It works as a strong sign the story has truly begun.
I Don’t Care About Dylar Anymore
The third section of this book centres around a fictional drug called Dylar. It’s designed to reduce or eradicate fear of death. We’re told Dylar doesn’t work, and the story gives us enough reason to believe it’s true, but we never get to experience Jack (our protagonist) directly take Dylar, so we can’t see it for ourselves.
Initially, I expected this story to lead us to Jack taking Dylar, so we could see what it really did. But this never happened. Instead, we get a showdown between Jack and Willie Mink, the man who developed the drug and traded it with Babette for sexual favours. We see he’s broken and disjointed by his consistent use of the drug. But more importantly, his dialogue reads weirdly similar to the narration. Mink speaks in incoherent phrases, references adverts and small-prints, and struggles to stick to one topic. He’s the living embodiment of the entire book. Meeting Mink means something different for us than it does for Jack. The protagonist gets to see the scientist who tormented his mind be reduced to a shell of a person, broken by his own creation — we get to see what Dylar actually feels like, and it feels exactly like reading the book. It’s dissociative, disconnected, unusually primal at times, and overall lethargic.
I don’t care about Dylar anymore because I spent 300+ pages taking it.
The whole point of anything
There’s several recurring sentence structures inside this book. One that sticks out somewhere in the third section is the phrase “the whole point of____”. Jack uses it multiple times to refer to his wife, reducing her to an object in his world, repeating “the whole point of Babette is___”. However, some chapters later, one of their kids uses the phrase “the whole point of space is to give molecules a chance to cool down”. It’s used in an innocuous and cold way to speak about a pseudoscientific point that doesn’t directly connect to the story. Mink later says “the point of rooms is they’re inside”.
It’s a common phrase, but not overused. It’s designed to diminish something and rationalise it. Many books would start by using a phrase like this in relatively basic or seemingly normal circumstances, only for it to become more meaningful later, but White Noise does the opposite. When Jack uses it in a discussion with Babette, it sticks out like a sore thumb immediately — who talks about their partner like this? It makes it obvious that we should pay attention when we run into it later. I’ve not read something like this before, but it works fantastically. It plays into a core theme of White Noise, reduction: academically, faithfully, relationally, existentially.
Dialogue Serves a Weird Purpose
Dialogue is important in this story, but not in the conventional sense. You learn early on that people speak in a specific way. When asked questions they usually press against them with additional questions, evading the original topic. Heinrich, one of the older children, does this most prominently, but over time you’ll see most characters give it a try. Jack, Babette, Murray (Jack’s academic friend), and even Mink do this. Everybody is combative, yet nobody is violent.
I made a decision early on that I’d stop trying to keep track of who’s speaking in any quick-paced back-and-forth dialogue, as it didn’t mean much. Characters rarely learn new things from these interrogations, and we rarely learn new things about the characters. They add to the book’s intentional clutter. That said, there are no truly skippable pieces of dialogue. It’s hard to explain, but even if you learn nothing about the characters or the story you immerse yourself further in the world itself. The frustration and occasional boredom is how our characters feel.
A Hard, Yet Simple, Book
White Noise reads smoothly. It’s got easy prose. Things are rarely hard to decipher. It doesn’t use too many complex terms. Yet, it’s exhausting. Much of this book feels like you’re staring at a television and cannot change the channel. It’s meant to. It’s a numbing agent. It numbs you to the hell our characters live in. That’s why it’s sadder on reflection than inside it.
A (Controversially) Satisfying Ending
Some people say White Noise has an anti-climactic ending. I disagree. I’d argue it ends in a very traditional way: our protagonist faces off against the man who plagued him. The man who had sex with his wife, the man who has the psychological cure to his fear of death. Not only does he have a direct and relatively long dialogue with him, he shoots him, then saves him. The ending even includes talks of religion when he’s at the hospital.
Most stories of an existential flavour don’t contain these moments. Rather, they imply them or tell us we shouldn’t want them. From a story like White Noise, we got much more than we could ask for. The one thing I initially wanted which I never got was to see what Jack felt like after Dylar, but I believe the purpose of the ending is to show us that it doesn’t matter anyway, and that we have our answer, regardless.
I’ve spoken about a lot of positives, but I have two issues I found that can’t be ignored, and which hold me back from giving this a higher score.
The Wilder Problem
The very final chapter involves Wilder, the youngest child, riding his tricycle across a dangerous road, only to survive it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this– it fits the themes of death, danger, and mundane life. The problem is that Wilder represents something incompatible with the themes of the story. Jack and Babette treat Wilder as someone who is devoid of the shadow of death, or of life’s complex systems. They speak about feeling safer or more comfortable around him, acting as a salve to their worries.
However, children are people, too, and we have no actual idea what Wilder is experiencing. Wilder went through the toxic airborne event, just as the rest of the family. He absorbs the world as they do. He has his own noise, as every individual does. Nobody should be immune, but Wilder is seen as a knife that cuts through it all. I would have been comfortable accepting the idea that Jack and Babette used Wilder as a numbing agent in a utilitarian way, where the parents see him as a means to an end, and have failed to connect to him (i.e. suggesting the whole point of Wilder is to help his parents).
But… the ending suggests otherwise. The very final chapter suggests the author actually views Wilder as being able to cut through the mess of life without the chains of death. The end romanticises childhood in a way that feels antithetical to the story itself. It’s possible we’re meant to feel this way, but I doubt it. One saving grace that suggests perhaps Wilder is not representative of idolised childhood innocence is the chapter about his screaming. In an early chapter, Wilder suddenly and consistently screams, for which Jack and Babette cannot understand. In one of the final chapters, screaming is referenced again, but this time about Ivan Ilyich, where Murray says the most sense we can make out of death is the Tolstoy character’s scream. This could be a signal that Wilder actually is experiencing torment and it’s just that he cannot process it… not that processing would do much, as suffering conceptualised is either the same screaming from Ivan Ilyich, or the dull ache of Jack and Babette.
The Pseudoacademia
White Noise is a commentary on academic life. Jack and Murray are both lecturers who share their musings on the universe, all while revealing little of any significance. Most of what they say feels lower than first-year philosophy. I get this is intentional– we’re not meant to treat these people as inherently smart, but it’s so hard to keep this mindset when it’s unrelenting. This book has so many profound insights, but they’re buried in stuff that doesn’t automatically feel like a parody. Much of what they both say is heard and believed by people all across the world. This makes it much harder to find the parts that resonate.
This isn’t necessarily bad. In fact, it means that you can return to this story at many points in life and get something else from it. If I read this at secondary school I’d probably have highlighted some of their trash. If I read it at university I’d highlight other trash. I’m out of uni, and I’ve highlighted a different kind of trash. It’s impossible to fully escape. That’s kind of cool, and in many ways it works as the best form of noise, as it really does take some critical thinking to avoid it.
Final Words
I was curious about how I’d feel after finishing White Noise. I’d gotten tied into these characters’ lives, but I hadn’t felt much for them throughout. Yet upon putting the book down it hit me just how sad their lives are, and how tragic living can be. Emotionally, it’s burned a hole through me. And I recommend it to anybody who’s interested in existentialist, absurd, and unusual fiction.
For further critical discussions on substances, culture, and medicine, check out my physical magazine, Existential Horror. This is a 250+ page publication designed to be a critique and celebration of psychedelia and substance-use culture. Vol 2 is out now!
