White Noise by Don DeLillo

Format: eBook
Read: February 2026

I finally read White Noise, my first piece of writing by American author Don DeLillo. It took a long time. I started it in December and got as far as Part 2, then I decided my end of year brain couldn’t cope with it, so I put it down to re-read Rouge over the Christmas break, and then I picked it back up a couple of weeks ago.

White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, a teacher of Hitler studies at a liberal arts college (don’t get distracted by this; it’s a thematic choice). Jack has a successful career, a happy and loving marriage with this fourth wife, Babette, and is the proud and engaged father of multiple children in their blended family, four of whom live with them. One day, a large, black, toxic cloud covers the town, and exposes both Jack and Babette’s obsessive fear of death.

I feel a bit conflicted on this one. On the one hand, I do think it is a very clever piece of writing with cutting satire. But, on the other hand, I base my ratings on my personal enjoyment of the book, and I struggled to get through it with its meandering narrative and very little plot. I don’t have an issue with plot-lite books per se, but if we are plot-lite, I need characters and themes to resonate with me, and that wasn’t there for me on this read. It is possible that I just didn’t Get It this time around, and I might like it more on a re-read.

Jack Gladney

We are in Jack Gladney’s first-person point of view for the story. Occassionally he takes on an omniscient role, telling of things that happened to another character, but in general, we are hearing his thoughts and experiences. Jack is an observer and takes time to consider the thoughts and motives of the people around him. In part, this is because he harbours two shameful secrets. The first is that, despite being the most prominent figure in North America on ‘Hitler studies’, he cannot speak a word of German. He tries to learn the language in secret but struggles with it, and consequently lives in fear that he will be discovered as a fraud.

The second is a pervasive and acute anxiety over his own death. His academic career in studying Hitler is a deliberate choice. Hitler was a larger-than-life figure responsible for deaths on an unimaginably large scale, which, in comparison, could make Jack’s own death feel insignificant. The Airborne Toxic Event leads to his exposure to a toxic chemical that could shorten his life span, and despite the timescales given being vague and in truth of small consequence to a middle-aged man (he’s told they won’t know anything for 15 years), this intensifies Jack’s fear.

“Helpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate and darkly loom.”
“You’re talking about Hitler, I take it.”
“Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death. You thought he would protect you. I understand completely.”

Jack has a loving and happy relationship with his fourth wife, Babbette. She is a solid and nurturing woman with great hair. Jack values the openness and honesty he feels in their relationship because it contrasts with his former wives, who were all employed in espionage. This is why her revealed deception hurts him so much; it is not what she did as much as what she never confided in him.

Though ultimately I question his repetition over “the point of Babette” and felt it demonstrated that he only actually perceived his wife in the ways that she could serve him and his own. His reaction to learning they shared the same intense fear of death was hurt, some anger because fear of death was his thing, and not empathy or support.

You’ve been depressed lately. I’ve never seen you like this. This is the whole point of Babette. She’s a joyous person. She doesn’t succumb to gloom or self-pity.”

Jack has four children who live with him. All the elder children (a blend of his and Babette’s previous marriages) – Heinrich, Denise and Steffie – are all very intelligent, self-possessed and inquisitive, more so than either of their parents. Often, more sense comes out of their mouths than from any of the adults. The children are more willing to think for themselves, while the adults will sit back and wait to be told what to do.

Wilder is the three-year-old child of Babette and Jack, and curiously, he is nonverbal, and they have a habit of picking him up, carrying him and then leaving him up on a countertop or elsewhere to feed him, then leaving him unsupervised. There is also a point where he cries nonstop for seven hours. They take him to the GP, he stops, and nothing more comes of it. Jack barely gives it a second thought, unusual when he spends much time thinking about the personalities and inner lives of the others. I suspect Wilder is symbolic of their marriage, and they both comment that being around Wilder, with his innocent little ego, makes them less afraid of death.

The white noise of modern life

Accumulations, devastations. The old people shopped in a panic. When TV didn’t fill them with rage, it scared them half to death

This book is full of white noise. At the highest level, it’s structured as a loose collection of barely related and mostly banal everyday anecdotes, which is a noise to try to cut through to detect the plot and purpose.

There is the background noise of consumerism to everything. Brand names are often used, brightly coloured packages are frequently described, and numerous scenes take place in the supermarket or shopping malls. The family are also always eating, literally consuming the plastic packaged items they buy. The house is described as being full of heaps of Stuff, just Stuff everywhere in heaps and bags and mounds.

Technology is also more literal background noise.  Speech and sounds from the TV or the radio cut through the conversations or thoughts of characters. Jack puts great faith in the voices on the TV. He and Babette won’t leave the house until men with megaphones evacuate them during the Airborne Toxic Event because the TV says it’s nothing to worry about. As the children raise concerns, they all sit around the dinner table eating.

Information is everywhere, and this is a book from 1985, before the Internet Age. TV, radio, books and magazines are full of new and often contradictory advice, and adults seem to be losing the ability to think for themselves. This is demonstrated by the courses Babette teaches at the community centre.

Knowledge changes every day. People like to have their beliefs reinforced. Don’t lie down after eating a heavy meal. Don’t drink liquor on an empty stomach. If you must swim, wait at least an hour after eating. The world is more complicated for adults than it is for children. We didn’t grow up with all these shifting facts and attitudes. One day they just started appearing. So people need to be reassured by someone in a position of authority that a certain way to do something is the right way or the wrong way, at least for the time being. I’m the closest they could find, that’s all

Babette on being asked to teach eating and drinking at the local community centre, (p.187).

Reality, the artificial and derivatives

This theme weaves through the whole book. Jack’s academic persona conflicts with his inability to speak German. While on campus, he enjoys wearing the theatrical costume of the academic gown and dark glasses, and at the conference, the delegates are all dressed in similarly thematic ways. The very idea of “Hitler studies” is also derivative of the study of real history or politics, where he is treated as a cultural icon and symbol instead of a historical reality. Murray’s dream to teach ‘Elvis Studies’ – which he teaches car crash studies – is another example of this. There is even a scene where they publicly debate the mothers of these two cultural icons for the amusement of those around them! Who had the most important relationship with their Mum – Elvis or Hitler?

There is also a lot of theatre when Jack visits medical establishments. The machines and medical data, and the questionnaires he completes with the Doctor which seems to be completely meaningless. There was also an interesting conversation with a Nun later in the novel where they touch on religious belief. How much of that is performance, and who is it really to benefit? DeLillo suggests through the Nun that it is the non-believers who take comfort from the existence of those who profess belief.

“All the old muddles and quirks,” I said. “Faith, religion, life everlasting. The great old human gullibilities. Are you saying you don’t take them seriously? Your dedication is a pretense?”
“Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe

As I already mentioned, many scenes are set in the supermarket as a central hub of their lives and community. They stroll aisles full of brightly packaged, processed foods while under harsh artificial lighting. At one point, when Jack is struggling with his panic, he goes shopping at the mall as a place to calm himself down (supermarkets and shopping centres have the very opposite effect on me!). These are places where the environment is designed and controlled. There is also the ever-present white noise of the media, who are also creating another reality. The Airborne Toxic Event is narrated through the news, and first is just a “feathery plume” that should cause no alarm despite the large dense black clouds they see outside (also made from a derivate chemical), and Jack also clings to the idea that he is a college professor and now the sort of person shown in disaster reports that they see on the TV, so nothing bad could happen to him.

Most oviously there is also SIMULVAC, which appears a few times in the book. This is a government agency who carry out simulations of disasters to prepare for evacuations in real disasters, and also future simulations of disasters. It’s completely absurd, and the idea that people become used to seeing SIMULVAC around with volunteers pretending to be victims of a disaster (Jack sees his daughter literally lying in the street playing dead) who help at all. This is another way that the artificial and reality are blended together, and it makes it more difficult to tell when a real disaster does happen, and people are actually in danger.

Fear of death

All of this noise is still not enough of a distraction from the fear of death. As already discussed, Jack hangs his whole identity on the dread of his mortality.

So many struggle with this existential fear of death that the experimental drug Dyler was developed, and people go to extreme lengths to get their hands on it. However, there are other characters in the book that offer a counterpoint to Jack’s perspective. There is Murray, Jack’s colleague, who has a impressible lust for life and aims to live every day to its fullest potential, and Winnie, the lab tech who helps Jack examine the pill. For her, the fear of death gives an essential texture and motivation to human existence.

Sex is frequently used in juxtaposition to danger or actual death in the book. There are many times where Jack and Babette engage in some kind of sexual touching before death appears in some way in a following scene.

Conclusions

It strikes me that today, in 2026, we have more white noise in our lives than ever. If DeLillo though Modern life was noise in 1985, I don’t know what her make of life now. Our reality is warped by endless streams of edited, filtered versions of reality or, now with generative AI, completely artificial and then fed to us in feeds curated by algorithms that present each person their own pocket universe. American media, in particular, is now in its dystopian  ‘fake news’ post-truth post-facts era.

It feels apt to me that I finally got around to reading this book in the same year I’ve decided to make an effort to be more ‘analogue’ again. I’m back to pen and paper notebooks, writing in my journal, highlighting my books and trying to give my brain some more moments of quiet time for me to figure out what my own thoughts and opinions are. I’m never going to be able to shut out all the external noise, but I can try to cut through some of it.

It feels a bit harsh to give this 3 stars, but for all its cleverness, I have to admit I found it a slog to finish. It starts well, but then really meanders and becomes hard to follow.