I just finished a re-read of Don DeLillo’s White Noise and my rambling about him got too long for a reasonably-sized Goodreads review. So, some more general thoughts about DeLillo’s style.

There are a number of Goodreads reviews complaining about his style in a very literal way, like how the dialogue fails to be realistic. Which to me is sort of like going to a rock concert and being upset that they’re not playing any of your favorite Beethoven pieces. Such reviewers are certainly free to not like how he handles dialogue, but they’re also sort of missing the point, I think. He’s not a literal writer. His dialogue is really an internal one, but to make it into interesting writing he has some characters saying these things out loud as conversations, and that’s how things work and people talk in the DeLillo universe.

In White Noise, DeLillo is trying to describe the dread and anxiety inherent in modern life. We’re all trapped in an overwhelmingly complex system and rely on the system to provide for our health and well-being. For food, we go to the supermarket where the fundamental choice is between a colorful familiar product you think you know well (thanks to ultra-ubiquitous advertising) or a bland generic you don’t (even though it’s largely the same thing). Either way, you don’t know the origin of the products. You don’t know what’s in them really. For your health, you go to doctors who know more than you about your own body in an objective way, but they’re also separate people with their own communication issues, so how can they really get to know you and every risk factor you encounter? For safety, we rely on governments that we can’t entirely trust, and they are made up of uncertain mortal people just like us.

So, something about DeLillo’s style particularly rings true in White Noise, I think, because the book is so much about how your own internal thoughts find no reconciliation with the outside forces of commercialism and authority and government that affect you.  The same is true for another book of his I liked, Mao II. But it doesn’t always work, especially when the story is more plot-driven and less about what people are thinking.  It was good and bad in Libra and in the film Game 6. And I thought it was largely a miss in Running Dog, which I think was something of an attempt to write a kind of spy-thriller, and didn’t click at all with his style and became a slog. (I have yet to attempt the ambitious [read: long] Underworld.)

Here is where I remind you I am no literary scholar. Thank you.