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What it argues
Don DeLillo's 1985 National Book Award winner follows Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies at the fictional College-on-the-Hill, through domestic life with his fourth wife Babette and their assembled blended family of children. The novel's first half is comedic and deliberately surface-level: supermarket trips, television noise, academic absurdity, brand names in lists. Jack is likeable and anxious. His anxiety has a specific subject: he is afraid of death, and so is Babette, and their marriage is partly an alliance against that shared fear.
The novel's second half turns on an industrial accident — the "Airborne Toxic Event," a chemical cloud released by a train derailment — which forces the family to evacuate and exposes Jack to a dose of a toxic substance called Nyodene D. From there, the novel darkens: Jack discovers that Babette has been taking an experimental drug called Dylar, which is supposed to eliminate the fear of death, and that she obtained it through a transaction he finds devastating. The comedy doesn't disappear but it shifts register, and DeLillo's prose — always charged with a low hum of cultural static — becomes something stranger and more menacing.
What it gets right
- 1.
Consumer culture, in DeLillo's reading, functions as a collective anesthetic against death anxiety — the supermarket is a cathedral, and its promises are essentially religious.
- 2.
Jack's Hitler Studies specialty is treated as a symptom: he chose the most concentrated example of death and mass fear in modern history as his professional subject, and the irony is that it doesn't help him manage his own fear.
- 3.
The Airborne Toxic Event shows how media coverage mediates experience — the family compares their experience to the news reports of their experience in real time, unsure which is more real.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Don DeLillo was born in 1936 in the Bronx, New York, to Italian immigrant parents. He began publishing fiction in the 1960s and established himself as a major American novelist with Americana (1971) and Ratner's Star (1976). White Noise (1985) won the National Book Award. His subsequent novel Libra (1988), about the Kennedy assassination, and Underworld (1997), widely considered his masterwork, cemented his reputation as one of the defining novelists of American life. His work is characterized by its attention to media, violence, celebrity, and the hum of late capitalism. He was awarded the PEN/Saul Bellow Award in 2010.
