The background of death surrounds in White Noise

White Noise by Don DeLillo is an interesting book. It is written in a playful, wry style. For instance, the main character Jack, is a Hitler studies expert and professor in a small, prestigious university (famous for Jack’s studies, since he was the first in the country to promote this course), yet he doesn’t speak German. The book follows Jack in his everyday life, and his dealings with quirky family members and work associates. As a modern family, the tv is always on in one room or another, so you think the title refers to the constant stream of commercials and background sound (the author does intersperse a line regularly into the novel from the tv), but really it is about the death all around us.  The backdrop of the novel is Jack’s obsessive fear of death. He thinks about it often, such as when he will die, how he will die, etc.

Jack’s fear grows exponentially when there is a waste spill just outside of town, and the residents must evacuate for a time for safety. Jack is exposed, and the response team (again humorously, a “fake” response team that is meant to practice for calamities is instead having to do the real thing first, and practice later in the novel) tells Jack that his life has almost definitely been shortened. When Jack finally tells his wife Babette about his real fear, she says she has the same fear, but while it is a nagging obsession with Jack, it is a paralyzing fear for Babette. She has gone so far as to find a black market pill that is supposed to subdue the fear of death, and she has been having an affair with the drug-maker to keep a steady supply coming. Jack takes this news in stride; with his own increasing dread he realizes he would do just about anything to rid himself of the fear as well.

In the end, something snaps in Jack, and he wants to get the medicine his wife has been taking, to see if it will help. He goes to the sleazy motel where she has been meeting the drug maker, and confronts him with the intent to rob and kill him. It goes astray though, and both end up at a local religious hospital, being cared for by nuns. Jack turns to a nun, looking for some faith to ease his troubled mind, and she admits she isn’t even religious and doesn’t believe in God or an after-life.

Funny little stories about death fill the book, such as Jack’s son’s friend who wants to sit in a pit with 70 deadly vipers to get in the Guinness book of records, or youngest son Wilder, who Babette is always checking on, but manages to find himself in the middle of a busy interstate at the end of the novel (he doesn’t get hurt). There are many more. Even the local grocery store where Jack and his friend Murray shop can be a metaphor for death. This book was much different than most of the other classics I’ve been reading lately, and a good, if somewhat unsettling, change of pace.