white noise (don delillo)

Once upon a time I used to read DeLillo. And then the reading stopped. Returning to the writer, twenty years later, is a curious experience. White Noise feels by parts frustrating, by parts brilliant. It has the feel of a sophomore work, full of tricks and conceits and authorial presence. Then I learn it was his eighth novel. The conceit of the narrator being a professor of Hitler studies at a remote US university, one who doesn’t speak German, feels like a brilliant idea, but doesn’t really go anywhere. The conceit of the narrator’s world being threatened by a toxic cloud, which takes up the central portion of the book, likewise seems a brilliant, Camusian idea, but again, it doesn’t really go anywhere. This is a novel bubbling with tricks and ideas, but one which delivers no coups de grace. Perhaps it’s in the vein of the nouveau roman, almost Barthesian, but there’s something showy about the whole contraption, made of bells and whistles that articulate the author’s intellectual chutzpah but fall short of ever really saying anything.