The Sheila Variations

New Book

Don DeLillo's White Noise has been sitting un-read on my shelf for 2 or 3 years now. Occasionally, it shows up on those "greatest novels of the last 27 and a half years" lists which are done from time to time. And a couple of people whom I trust have said, "Oh man, you've gotta read it."

Anyone out there read it?

I know the premise. There's some kind of industrial accident (this has not yet occurred in the book, which has a very benign almost pastoral beginning) - and a black cloud floats over the university town where the main character lives. But worse than the black cloud is the "white noise" which takse over their lives - the air around them pulsing, constantly, with "white noise".

I don't know what it all will mean, and what conclusions DeLillo will draw - but the premise definitely intrigues me.

And good Lord can this guy write. His prose is startlingly good. Some of his paragraphs are masterful constructions, like a piece of music - and occasionally - one sentence will stand out of the entire page, glowing like a gem. Startling sentences.

Here DeLillo (or the narrator) describes going food shopping with his wife and kids in the suburbs:

It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls - it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening.

And the narrator describes Babette, his wife -

Babette is tall and fairly ample; there is a girth and heft to her. Her hair is a fanatical blond mop, a particular tawny hue that used to be called dirty blond. If she were a petite woman, the hair would be too cute, too mischievous and contrived. Size gives her tousled aspect a certain seriousness. Ample women do not plan such things. They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body.

The narrator describes the university, where he is on the faculty:

The teaching staff is composed almost solely of New York emigres, smart, thuggish, movie-mad, trivia-crazed. They are here to decipher the natural language of the culture, to make a formal method of the shiny pleasures they'd known in their Europe-shadowed childhoods - an Aristotelianism of bubble gum wrappers and detergent jingles. The department head is Alfonse (Fast Food) Stompanato, a broad-chested glowering man whose collection of prewar soda pop bottles is on permanent display in an alcove. All his teachers are male, wear rumpled clothes, need haircuts, cough into their armpits. Together they look like teamster officials assembled to identify the body of a mutilated colleague. The impression is one of pervasive bitterness, suspicion and intrigue.

Posted by sheila