Near the beginning of White Noise, first published 30 years ago this week, Don DeLillo describes a bizarre tourist spot just outside of Blacksmith, the hometown of protagonist Jack Gladney and his friend Murray Jay Siskind. Into the site flock crowds with cameras and grandparents, who assemble at an elevated patch for the perfect view. The attraction is the most photographed barn in America, a sort of vaunted holy place that, like DeLillo’s malls and supermarkets, affirms in visitors a sense of consumerist immanence, their very own place in history. To nobody’s great concern, however, the barn itself doesn’t actually exist. "No one sees the barn," Murray admits, as a man sells postcards from a booth. "Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."
Oscillating drily between satire, mysticism and deadpan omen, the most photographed barn scene—one of fiction’s earliest adoptions of Baudrillardian theory—is DeLillo at his purest. Part of the reason the Bronx author has transcended his cult is that authentic blend of perception and paranoia. In White Noise it never feels heavy-handed or passé, even as the narrator struggles free from plot to take on the invisible menace of our time—not just the bland hum of domestic technology but every toxic emanation of advanced capitalism, the logos and packages, jingles and reruns, plastics and chemicals, all part of a nebulous conspiracy that never quite rewards our paranoia.
To mark the book’s 30th anniversary, we asked the book’s musician fans to zone in on the scenes and flourishes that most caught their imagination, and how the book has affected the way they think. What’s illuminated in the subsequent testimonials—from Arto Lindsay, Matthew Herbert and members of Interpol, Vampire Weekend, Parquet Courts and Ought—is the marvellous breadth of DeLillo’s influence, as well as his work’s remarkable adaptability to a generation that feels ever more alienated from packaged notions of reality, the economy and ethics.
Arto Lindsay
I remember the scenes of people fleeing. And DeLillo’s ideas about distribution: The sense that sounds were distributed, the effect of snow, the migration of students on and off campus, this nuclear cloud. I was in Tokyo last year, on tour, and one morning I woke up and looked out the window. And I had this flash that, God, Tokyo could be completely abandoned in 20 years, because of the nuclear breakdown. Just north of the city there's low-level radiation all over–it's in the water supply, the food, the air, the ground. It’s not dangerous, apparently, for adults, but it is dangerous for children. I had this vision of an empty Tokyo, with all these air conditioning units, delivery motorbikes, abandoned appliances.
Tokyo is like a thousand, a million, a gazillion warrens. Little spaces all built up, all kind of humid, all mildew-ready. They think about what it's like to be inside real historical change, something that's really hard to perceive. We've grown up being aware of so many things that we can't really affect, the whole general Kafkaesque nature of industry. Telephones, airlines, broadband. Post-industrialism, the whole way we live. And we can't imagine how to effect economic change. Nobody can seem to imagine how to slow down climate change.
Something prescient in the book is that he connects all the annoying daily sounds—he sees them as all part of something. Sound has now been foregrounded in popular culture. Sound art became really popular, and people are much more discerning about the sound of recorded music. In the sixties it was Marshall McLuhan, all about visual stuff, but sound has become something people are more aware of. The sound of production, of sugar pouring into food. The jingles, the mass-produced pop music, endlessly repeated until we're convinced we enjoy it. It's part of our lives, it seems natural.
I actually had a chance to meet him a couple of years ago. I was on the jury of this little film festival in Portugal—he goes pretty much every year because he loves movies and they pay for him to go over there. He’s a really cool, low-key guy. Paul Auster was also there, talking about the movie stars he had breakfast with. DeLillo is not at all taken with that. His wife is a birdwatcher. They’re just people. He's very down to Earth, very Bronx. They're older, they have a bit of retired couple thing. He’s a little bit like one of his characters at this point.
Vampire Weekend's Chris Baio
I first read White Noise while touring the first Vampire Weekend album in late 2007-early 2008. What struck me then, as it does now, is the way the fear of death and consumerism mix throughout the book. Jack lays up at night wondering if he or his wife Babette will die first. Orest Mercator points out that more people are dead at this moment in time than ever before in history. A pair of elderly siblings presumed dead turn out to have been stuck in a mall for four days, overwhelmed by the modern shopping experience. From time to time there will be a paragraph break and Jack will just list consumer items like Selson Blue and the Toyota Celica. The brand names take on a prayer-like quality.
The idea of "brain fade" comes up at one point—minds not working correctly on account of the constant bombardment of information. I've spent days of my life surfing the internet, clicking links and opening tabs, often retaining very little. I don't think I'm alone in this. Do I waste time in the moment because I'm unaware of my mortality or because I'm aware of my mortality and don't want to think about it? Even though White Noise is a pre-Internet book, it feels very ‘now’ to me.
I love all the bits about Dylar, the pill that's meant to cure the fear of death. Towards the end of the book we meet Mr. Gray, project manager of the drug, now addicted to the pills. And what is this guy who has no fear of death wearing? A pair of bermuda shorts covered in Budweiser logos. Incredible!
Parquet Courts' Andrew Savage
White Noise first came to me when I was living in Denton, TX, a liberal college town where I was born, raised, matriculated and came of age. A town not drastically different from how I imagine Blacksmith to be. Before moving to New York I worked as a building monitor for the art department, the job description being to sit at a table in a huge, mostly empty university building through the night, keeping a watchful eye and eventually locking up. I don't know why I was trusted with this task. Often me and the other building monitors, who were buddies of mine, would go drinking and return to our posts to lock up after the bars closed.
After being caught napping too many times (as well as being absent entirely), I had to commit to fulfilling what little accountability I had. So I started reading. I became acquainted with the 'usual suspects': Pynchon, Dostoyevsky, Burroughs, Vollmann, Barthelme, and somewhere in there was Don DeLillo, my introduction being White Noise. I remember feeling impressed by the fugue-structure of the book, the Grecian chorus of modern life ebbing in and out of the narration, and the way it got increasingly surreal, to the point where it felt like it’d collapse on itself.
What struck me most is the way American life deals with the fear of mortality. From the beginning Jack Gladney is a relatable character, someone who fears people finding out who he really is—a fraud who cannot speak German, an academic who is more interested in Hitler than the Second World War. We all have these sorts of fears. The Dylar narrative, as a person who has had close friends and family in the grips of addiction, was especially relatable. It presented addiction for what it truly is: fear. I could relate to Denise’s fears and suspicions as well as Babette’s lying and evasion.
Most of all I loved how dynamically the book interpreted reality. Within the drudgery and melodrama of small-town family life there are fantastic punctuations of surrealism, such as the Airborne Toxic Event, or a convent hospital of no-nonsense atheist Nuns who maintain faith out of duty to mankind, rather than devotion to creator. Until White Noise, most of my criticism of culture came from the sloganeering of hardcore punk bands, which has its place, but I admired White Noise for being so nuanced and non-theatrical. I found myself paying more attention to the background music of life after reading it.
Since those days as a building monitor, my twilight days in Denton, TX, I read more often, not merely as a way to kill time but as means of enjoying and appreciating life a bit more. It takes me back to a time that seems both distant and golden. When things were changing rapidly and majorly in my life, for better and for worse—whenever anybody asks for a reading recommendation, one of the first things I inquire is usually, "Have you tried White Noise?"
Matthew Herbert
I saw Don DeLillo speak at the launch of Underworld in London. At the same time Paul Auster was really hitting his stride, and both writers had a big impact on me. They were both quite shocking to me: Paul Auster in terms of a revival of storytelling, and with Don DeLillo, an almost hallucinogenic quality with form, and yet it being tangible. He distills a modern American version of consumer-based capitalism, almost into chicken nuggets. He distills our interaction with the excess of information and products around us.
The characters themselves are almost part of the set. The light bulb that appears in the bathroom in the eighteenth chapter, page three, is painted with almost as much value as a principal character. There's a democratic wash, as though you're peering at an ant colony through plate glass. You're one step removed from it. He’s able to quite precisely describe the gaps between words, the air between people, the friction between an image and reality. It was so useful to have writers doing that, particularly then, and with what was to come with George Bush, the total collapse of the meanings of words. You see it in the CIA document, all the awful words that they used. "Enhanced interrogation techniques." Which is not letting someone sit down, or chaining them to the floor and letting them die there—it’s pure Don DeLillo, y’know? A world of absurd juxtapositions where white is black and black is white.
The '80s were a profound turning point in modern society. We were just coming to the end of Thatcherism, so the idea of a new form of capitalism was emerging. Ruthless capitalism that was even more exploitative. If you look at people's pay and equality levels, it really went into sharp decline from the '80s—deregulation of the financial markets, the housing markets, privatisation and the dismantling of the state under Thatcher and Reagan. And the Iraq War, the miner strike, energy reliance in this country—it really felt like things were shifting, and DeLillo spoke to that.
Without wanting to ramp up the hyperbole too much, it was also the beginning of the explosion of dance music. The summer of love in 1988, acid house and everything that went along with that. Electronic and dance music were a real liberation from all the rules and semi-tyrannical frames that I’d learned—playing instruments, practising scales, and if I played a wrong note I was a bad musician. And then dance music came along and said, Actually, there's still some vague rules but it's a free-for-all. There’s no hierarchy, everything is possible. Not just making music but also releasing on white labels, things like that.
Part of the challenge for those of us who believe that the right are wrong on almost everything, is to somehow repackage complex ideas in ways that can battle the truisms, platitudes and faux-naive simplicities of the right. DeLillo guides us through that battle by doing two things: by holding up a mirror to its absurdity, and by describing those absurdities in very precise ways. The most photographed barn in America is a good example of that. By condensing it to something utterly absurd, it takes on a kind of dadaist rendition that sums up what's wrong with the banal simplicity of the right and their version of the world.
Ought's Tim Beeler
A friend had lent the book to Matt [May, keyboardist], and it was lying around on the band’s communal bookshelf. Each of us read it in three days. I like the humour—it appears in different ways: The whole Hitler studies thing is so absurd, but the way he treats it is very matter-of-fact and true. As much as the idea is laughable, that could absolutely exist in an American liberal arts school.
The family dynamic is also really well portrayed. It's a popular subject matter for contemporary writers—the human condition re: society and suburban malaise and consumerism—but sometimes it feels beaten over the head. One of the things that got me with the book was the human characters. You get a lot of intimacy in comparison to the really inhuman surroundings that they live in.
It’s almost like magical realism, fantastical beings presented as if it were everyday, which I love. He takes suburban, plastic, cookie-cutter lifestyles and people, and he aggrandises them in a very quiet way. The fact that this feels so eerie and surreal, and yet is treated as an everyday occurrence. There's elements like the toxic event, where that is so surreal and yet so plausible. There's an unhurried unfurling, and it makes it that much more eerie. The author, the characters—no one is that concerned about this crazy toxic cloud. Everyone should be running and screaming, but it's almost like people have been expecting it, which rings so true. People aren't excited about chemicals being in everything. They still buy the products.
Interpol's Daniel Kessler
I have a friend who's an author, Adam Ross, I was picking his brain for some of his favourite works and he put White Noise right up there. I fell right into it at the beginning, because of the way DeLillo's describing the family situation—it's something James Salter does masterfully, too. Family, relationships, dysfunctions. I identified something familiar in White Noise before I ventured into the postmodern elements of it. Apocalyptic situations and so forth.
With the family, these aren't their first marriages. They have their history, they have baggage in a way, but the two of them have a pretty good dynamic, they seem like good partners. All this is delivered with cunning dialogue. Sometimes his descriptions of the family interactions stopped me in my tracks and resonated, so far as defining couplehood. There's this almost utopian aspect, that they're sort of like survivors: they've had different marriages, they have this mini-Brady Bunch family situation, these kids from different marital situations. It felt almost unbelievable.
When the vapours are emanating through the town, the mass pandemonium and exodus—I didn't really see that coming, truthfully, but it’s already pretty out-there, with the Hitler studies. Especially when you're bringing it back to the time it was written. You accept it, almost, the Hitler studies, because of the nature of the writing. The delivery, the belief in the character. The mass exodus, the warnings about what to do and what not to do. The long traffic jams and the absurdity of life.
