Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

What a stubborn, perplexing book. If I had any kind of life, I might resent the time this novel extracted from it to afflict me with its arch, dark-gray worldview. I know, I know. Being that I didn't go to an Ivy League college, don't visit the Guggenheim for relaxation, or work out while listening to atonal music, I probably had little chance making any headway here. Don DeLillo is just out of my league. I'm like an ant trying to learn brain surgery reading this book. So here's what happens, as best I can figure. A college professor named Gladney who chairs a department on Hitler studies in a nameless college finds he has contracted a strange contamination and finds himself unable to face the prospect of his death. He is befriended by a visiting professor who wants to form his own academic discipline around Elvis. Meanwhile, his wife takes these strange pills, and assorted children run about, having hyperliterate conversations about nucleotides and the perils of sugarless gum. The point of the novel, as best I can figure, is that we are all surrounded by waves and waves of meaningless sounds, images, and information designed to prop us up through our brief sojourns along this mortal highway. "We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information," one of Gladney's colleagues says, before they get one courtesy of an "airborne toxic event" that afflicts Gladney with his sad condition. Sad, except you never buy any of these people as real. Instead, they seem two-dimensional philosophic constructs designed to trot out some of DeLillo's often fascinating but always depressing ideas about the nature of man in a Godless universe. I couldn't get close to any of these people, not that I didn't try. There are those like the New York Times reviewer who describe "White Noise" as comic, and there are some archly amusing lines. One professor congratulates Gladney thusly: "Nobody on the faculty of any college or university in this part of the country can so much as utter the word Hitler without a nod in your direction, literally or metaphorically...He is now your Hitler, Gladney's Hitler. It must be deeply satisfying for you." That's irony, in case you didn't guess, even more pronounced because the speaker's Jewish. "White Noise" is certainly surreal. When a plane is about to crash, the voice on the address system informs the passengers: "We're a silver gleaming death machine." People fleeing the deadly cloud complain about the lack of media coverage. A friend of one of the children plans to insert himself in a glass cage with deadly mambas for 70 hours, to break the world record. There are moments of amusement, more dry chuckles than anything else. Certainly not engagement. I've read a couple of other DeLillo novels and liked them. "Underworld" was also surreal, but I cared more about the characters and the situations they found themselves in. "Libra" is a solid examination of the Kennedy assassination, a tour de force of imaginative historical reconstruction. But I found "White Noise" a mess. If you find otherwise, congratulations. Just don't say I didn't warn you.