Othello – William Shakespeare, c. 1603 ★★★½

Shakespeare's Least-Great Masterpiece

Shakespeare’s tragedies are recognized to be enduring classics above and beyond even the most celebrated literature. Of them, Othello maybe has the strongest case for contemporary resonance. The themes of irrational enmity and racial hatred have certainly not dated it at all.

But the case for Othello doesn’t ring as solidly to me as Shakespeare’s other three top tragedies: Hamlet, MacBeth, and King Lear. The main plot is constrained and deterministic. Its characters are relatively few and mono-dimensional, lacking for life. The comedic interludes are slight to the point of pointlessness. While Shakespeare tragedies deliver a kind of catharsis amid the Act V tears, here you get just bitter silence.

You get a great villain, one of the greatest of all time, and scenes of deep complexity and wit worth turning over in one’s head. But I never enjoy this one like I do the others. It only commands my respect.

White Noise – Don DeLillo, 1985 ★

Embracing the Chaos

Some books I read for enjoyment, others for a challenge. Then there are books like White Noise I read as a kind of secular penance, because every now and then I need something to more or less kick my teeth in.

Punishment literature, I call it. Post-modern literature is the more accepted term. It’s not my scene, but there are post-modern books, even a couple by the same author, that I can find pleasure in reading. White Noise is such a death-obsessed, narrative-splintered drag that I can’t even fake a baseline appreciation for it.

Jack Gladney is a college professor who chairs a department in Hitler Studies at a geographically isolated college. He is married to Babette, with whom he shares responsibility for a number of children (who are either his or hers but not theirs) and an all-consuming fear of dying.