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“The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus.” So opens Don DeLillo’s White Noise first published in 1985 and still for me as crisp, new, relevant as ever. It’s uncanny to think this book was not published recently or just now. White Noise is certainly my favorite novel of his, though it maybe not his greatest (whatever that means). It is, however, what I think is best book as novel. Often his novels become lumpy, or loose the thread. I marvel over his sentences, am fully enwrapped in his treatment of our paranoid hyper-mediated reality, yet the characters are not alive. The plot is a shrug. In White Noise two-dimensional characters reign supreme, with great agility, just as they would do in The Simpsons or Family Guy, with bitchy zest.
Here it all works for me. The combination of the story, the cohesion and control of the plot, pacing, all of his key sociopolitical themes, and then of course, there’s the matter of his miraculous gift: those sentences, that power of phrase-making, such a poet, this writer. Like Keats and Pessoa, like Harryette Mullen or Kim Hyesoon, DeLillo has a hypersensitive downright fetish for the way certain words are shaped, how they become patterned in strings and rows, even down to the molecular combination of repeated vowel clusters and doubled letters. Let’s take a look how Chapter 1 begins below. Then we’ll observe a few things.
WHITE NOISE
by Don DeLillo
The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags—onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.