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.

Libra – Don DeLillo, 1988 ★½

Conspiracy? Lone Gunman? Why Not Both?

If only every awful moment in history was as suited for fictionalization as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, with its strange characters, bizarre circumstances, and world-changing events.

Of course, many – perhaps even a majority – of Americans say that already happened with an outlandishly false and ridiculous piece of writing called the Warren Commission Report. In Libra, Don DeLillo dubs the Report “the Joycean Book of America…the novel in which nothing is left out.”

Underworld – Don DeLillo, 1997 ★★

Everyone's a Philosopher

Can reality be both random chaos and yet somehow mapped out like some endless Fibonacci sequence?

Does the idea of dancing around possible answers to that question over the course of over 40 years and 800 pages strike you as time well spent?

Well, here’s a novel that takes on the whole second half of the 20^th century as it revolved around two concurrent events, the first aerial detonation of a Soviet A-bomb and a home run that decided a National League championship.