White Noise [Paperback]

Winner of the National Book Award – a “eerie, brilliant, and touching” (New York Times) family drama about mass culture and the numbing effects of technology


Jack Gladney teaches Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America where his colleagues include New York expatriates who want to immerse themselves in American magic and dread. Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the usual rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism.

Then a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives, an airborne toxic event unleashed by an industrial accident. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the white noise engulfing the Gladney family--radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmerings--pulsing with life, yet heralding the danger of death.

One of the most ironic, intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America . . . [White Noise] poses inescapable questions with consummate skill.
--Jayne Anne Phillips,The New York Times Book Review

DeLillo's eighth novel should win him wide recognition as one of the best American noveslists. . . . the homey comedy ofWhite Noiseinvites us into a world we're glad to enter. Then the sinister buzz of implication makes the book unforgettably disturbing.
--Newsweek

A stunning book . . . it is a novel of hairline prophecy, showing a desolate and all-too-believable future in the evidence of an all-too-recognizable present. . . . Through tenderness, wit, and a powerful irony, DeLillo has made every aspect ofWhite Noisea moving picture of a disquiet we seem to share more and more.
--Los Angeles Times 

It's brilliance is dark and sheathed. And probing. InWhite Noise, Don DeLillo takes a Geigel#$