Don’t you love these Picador covers? The one on the left celebrates Picador’s 40th anniversary and the one on the right was designed by Noma Bar

Looking back on White Noise I realise just how twisty a novel it was. There are so many underlying themes and plot twists that I had trouble sorting it out in my head. That’s good thing by the way. Basically WN is about Jack Gladney (an academic and leading expert on Hitler who can’t speak German), his wife Babette and four kids and their suburban home in America. It’s a terribly normal but twisted life, where everyday gestures are picked over by Jack until they lose their familiarity. Shopping in the supermarket is surreal, as strangers pick over bland product boxes and you watch your colleague awkwardly flirt with your wife as if from a distance. Your children are bizarre creatures who live lives alien to you. Weird things happen in WN and nobody seems to know how to react so instead society just flows quietly on, pretending that nothing untoward has happened. Running throughout their lives is the background hum of advertising, logos, television and radio. It’s unsettlingly normal. There are two major events in the novel. One is Babette’s consumption of a mystery drug ‘Dylar’. The other is an unexplained ‘toxic airborne event’ which forces the entire town to evacuate. Both instances force Jack to face his fear of death.

I just can’t work out where the one of the left is from but it’s too beautiful and the right design is by Michael Cho for Penguin

The background hum of consumerism is disconcerting. Every so often there will be a pause in the conversation or Jack’s narration and a single line paragraph appears on the page. Sometimes it’s a line from a TV or radio left on in another room. Sometimes, even more weirdly it’s a little mantra of three connected brand names such as ‘MasterCard, Visa, American Express’. These chants are never explicitly stated to be Jack’s thoughts, and might be part of the descriptions of his surroundings told in the third person. These mantras seem religious in nature, the worship of consumerism that comes from turning brand names into status symbols. These status symbols become disconnected from the product they label and instead the phrases float about our heads, sliding to the surface when ever we have quiet moments. Jack even notices one of his daughters muttering car names in her sleep one night. It’s creepy.

Creepiest of all is Dylar, the drug that Babette takes and refuses to explain to Jack. These pills cause her to suffer memory loss and Jack and Babette’s daughter become increasingly worried for her. Its mysterious nature makes Dylar seem all the more unsettling, and builds on the tension in the book. It’s like the bogeyman in the horror movie; it’s twice as scary when you don’t know what underneath the shadows. The name of the pill has more scare factor than what it does.

Mysterious pills and weird side-effects? I see no cause for concern here

Related to separation of product from name and name from meaning is the separation of copies from originals. Invariably the copies are presented as being somehow preferable to the reality. Ok, I’m not sure that sentence made sense but bear with me guys. Jack is a professor, but feels the need to dress the part. He adopts a costume very day of academic robes and glasses and he grows a beard and adds to initials to his name in order to appear more distinguished. His intelligence is not what makes him a professor, it’s his costume. When he hears some devastating news during the evacuation all he thinks is how much he wishes he was still wearing his glasses and robes, as if they could protect from reality. After the ‘toxic event’ that infects the air the sunsets around town seem even more brilliant than normal, as if the fake improves on the natural. SIMUVAC, a company that simulate emergencies in order to prepare for real life catastrophe, use the real life catastrophe to practice their simulations. Confused? Read this exchange between Jack and a SIMUVAC employee in the barn where the evacuees congregate:

‘But this evacuation isn’t simulated. It’s real.’

‘We know that. But we thought we could use it as a model.’

‘A form of practice? Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?’

Lol, wot? The book is like that, funny but kind of ghastly.

People travel for miles in order to see THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. They take photos of the barn and of themselves photographing the barn and they’re only doing it so that they can take a photograph of the most photographed barn in America but that’s not a thing you can be famous for and no one would care about the barn if everyone just stopped bloody taking photos of it. Wow, it’s like trying to explain Kim Kardashian.

During the evacuation scene people start to get upset. Not because they’re cold and hungry and displaced. No, no. They’re angry that no one is talking about them on the news. That their struggle has not been acknowledged. Does it only become real and valid suffering if it’s on TV? (It’s like how it seems you’re not boyfriend and girlfriend until you’re facebook official) TV seems more real to these people than the reality they’re in. In another scene the family are transfixed by the image of Babette on the television, silent, grainy and obviously inferior to the real woman, the image of Babette is far more interesting to them than the real thing.

This just in: We will never love you but you prefer us to the company of those who do.

In all these instances a copy or an illusion is depicted as being more intense, more real, more valid or more interesting than the reality it obscures. Maybe the reality is too scary. Just as Jack is scared to face the world without his costume Babette is scared to turn the TV and radio off because of the things she thinks about in the silence. Her fear of death especially. Perhaps all those repeated mantras in the book is Jack trying desperately the fill the little voids in his life with brand names, to stop him from thinking about the fears that lurk underneath his thoughts at all time.

Oh my God I totally do that. Buying stuff makes me feel better all the time. You know, White Noise isn’t just a a disaster story or a book about weird drugs and mysterious toxic events, it’s a book about us. And death. But mainly us. I live in a completely different continent to Jack, was born after this book was published and very little of my life directly relates to his, but I see him clearly and I understand him. His world scares me, until I see it in my own. That scares me even more.

I recently attended a dialogue-focused writing workshop at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The workshop’s suggestions and commentary reiterated the fundamentals that can be found in most conventional classes and instructional guides. As the workshop reminded me of some principles, I couldn’t help comparing them to Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which I had just finished reading.

I remember noticing DeLillo’s dialogue when I read White Noise. The characters have sharp exchanges that are simultaneously humorous and tense and that propel them through the narrative’s conflict. They speak like contemporary Americans with idioms and spliced syntax galore.

Underworld shows DeLillo at full attention with regard to speech. The novel is a non-linear narrative with a fragmented chronology. Like in White Noise, the characters talk in clipped phrases that define their demographic, setting and temperament. But Underworld is set across a much larger stage, and this breadth empowers DeLillo to strut his stuff.

Because it takes place over a fifty-year period, Underworld captures characters at different points in their lives. The protagonist, Nick Shay, has modes of speech with dynamics that range from urban Brooklyn slang to middle-aged workplace reserve to elderly reverie. Nick becomes more real and more convincing as his experiences influence his speech patterns. The dialogue is not only appropriate, it is emergent. This is not a new technique, but DeLillo executes it with bravado.

The Writer’s Center workshop followed the contemporary trend regarding dialogue. Characters are meant to speak in a believable way but not in the way people actually speak. Literal transcriptions of everyday conversations would show that the way we actually speak is insipid and boring. The dialogue is supposed to characterize, reveal setting or move the conflict forward. Petty back-and-forth conversational fluff should not be included in a story.

Underworld includes dialogue that at first appears trivial, but the characters have multiple conversations at the same time. Important information is spliced inside an exchange about the weather. These simultaneous conversations characterize and reveal the speakers’ relationships.

DeLillo’s use of idioms and slang also defines his characters. The passages devoted to 1950s Brooklyn are especially noticeable in this respect. In fact, certain catch phrases are so abundant that they teeter on caricature. Many of DeLillo’s urban youths say “forget ‘bout it.” They speak with a little hostility toward each other. They repeat what the other has said to ridicule or belittle him. DeLillo is using tedious speech patterns, breaking the convention, to define setting and character.

DeLillo doesn’t use misspellings for dialect very often. But when he does, the effect is considerable. One character addresses a group with “youse,” (which rhymes with twos) as opposed to you, you all, y’all, etc. That one use of dialect flavored the entire scene.

The workshop discussed indirect and hidden dialogue as well. Underworld is filled with long passages devoted to the inner thoughts of characters. The passages have beautiful imagery and punch-packing epiphanies, but each character is less defined in these moments and is possessed by the author’s narrative voice. The characters speak differently from each other, but they think alike.

Conventions tell us to attribute dialogue with finesse. We should be told who is speaking and then be reminded for clarity. Most of Underworld’s characters simply “said,” but every so often they whisper or growl. A large number of exchanges have little or no reporting verbs. This was frustrating. The characters are well defined and speak differently, but the differences are not enough to discern without reporting verbs. I spent time rereading dialogue to better understand who said what when I shouldn’t have had to do that. When William Gaddis writes without reporting verbs, characters speak differently enough that it’s not laborious or annoying for the reader.

For the most part, Underworld follows the workshop’s instruction. There’s nothing too unconventional, but DeLillo takes more liberties there than in some of his other work. In response to a Paris Review interview statement regarding DeLillo’s unique dialogue, the author said “Well, there are fifty-two ways to write dialogue that’s faithful to the way people speak. And then there are times when you’re not trying to be faithful.” This sentiment reflects the workshop’s ethos as well. There are rules and suggestions for help and guidance, but no rules are absolute. What works, works.

White Noise

by Don Delillo
Reviewed by Shane

Much has been said about the dialogue in this book. With that said, most of the characters (with the possible exceptions of Babette and Vernon) sound exactly the same. Not only do they sound like each other, they all sound like the monologue of our first-person narrator. But I’m willing to forgive this particular quirk because the sameness of voice offers a sort of comically skewed version of reality, even if it is hard to say that the length of the book doesn’t compromise its effect.

Like Joseph Heller, Delillo employs repetition as both a plot device and a comic device. He applies anxiety to commonplace situations as in one scene where a character interrogates another in a discussion about James Dean:

“Where the hell were you?” he said, as if the thought had just occurred to him that the actor’s death was not complete without some record of Grappa’s whereabouts.

“I know exactly where I was, Alfonse. Let me think a minute.”

“Where were you, you son of a bitch?”

“I always know these things down to the smallest detail. But I was a dreamy adolescent. I have these gaps in my life.”

“You were busy jerking off. Is that what you mean?”

“Ask me Joan Crawford.”

“September thirty, nineteen fifty-five. James Dean dies. Where is Nicholas Grappa and what is he doing?”

“Ask me Gable, ask me Monroe.”

“The silver Porsche approaches an intersection, going like a streak. No time to brake for the Ford sedan. Glass shatters, metal screams. Jimmy Dean sits in the driver’s seat with a broken neck, multiple lacerations. It is five forty-five in the afternoon, Pacific Coast Time. Where is Nicholas Grappa, the jerk-off king of the Bronx?”

“Ask me Jeff Chandler.”

The dryness is interrupted enough times to have a laugh-out-loud effect.

The book isn’t without  ambiguity and sometimes pseudo-poetic description: a squirrel moves in a “passage so continuous it seemed to be its own physical law.” The January light has a “hardness and confidence.” A black cloud is “more or less shapeless”—does that mean it is kind of and kind of isn’t shapeless or just one or just the other? Despite this, Delillo is a comic genius and brilliant at pacing. While Part One of the book is episodic and anxiety-inducing, Part Two consists of a single novella-like chapter about “the air-born toxic event” that will bring the characters and their fear of death to a more immediate place in their lives. Part Three is almost entirely plot-driven, a product of Part Two which involves a medical conspiracy.

Despite a few awkward places in the text (some intentional and some, I fear, not so intentional) Delillo is capable of perceptions that are almost Proustian in range:

The women laughed, six heads bobbing. It was insider’s laughter, a little overdone, meant to identify them as people bound together in ways not easily appreciated by the rest of us.

Or:

Once I almost asked her to put on legwarmers before we made love. But it seemed a request more deeply rooted in pathos than in aberrant sexuality and I thought it might make her suspect that something was wrong.

It’s easy to point to Delillo’s predecessors. His wit is Helleresque, his obsessions are Kafkaesque (but perhaps all obsessions are), his paranoia is Pynchonian. And after all these esques and ians are clear, what distinguishes Delillo enough to make something Delillian or Delilloesque? Maybe he’s not presenting us with new materials he can claim to his own name, but it would be hard to say that he isn’t a kind of bridge between generations. His strains of influence seem to reach as far as David Foster Wallace, Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis and perhaps Zadie Smith. One thing that seems to distinguish his pace toward the end of the book is his lack of fear in depicting characters who have a real tenderness toward one another (which “pomo” authors so easily and happily fail at), despite the formal experiments that go great lengths to achieve a tone of emotional draught throughout the book.

Despite the formal experiments, White Noise offers an articulate narrative with plenty of memorable chuckle-inducing moments. But be warned, the book will force you to think about death. And I don’t simply warn you about this because death is a weighty subject; I warn you because it will keep making you think about death (and not even that deeply) long after it’s interesting. Perhaps his ultimate joke was–by saying something with many words that he could have said with few–to make us aware that after the book has been put aside, we will look at the clock and realize how much closer we are to his main subject.

“It was just like a series of mini-movies,” Giamatti said Friday. His character’s scene with Packer was one of only a few that take place outside the confines of his car. “Packer created this environment that is completely isolated and then forces people into his environment,” said Cronenberg, who won a special jury prize in Cannes back in 1996 for Crash.

DeLillo said he found inspiration from simply observing limousines traipsing across New York City around the turn of the century. “Manhattan streets were filled with all these white stretched limousines at the time, and it is the last place on earth where such cars can move easily,” he said. “So I began the novel thinking of one man in one car.”

And that man in the car is, of course, Robert Pattinson, who admitted that he felt nervous in the days before shooting started on Cosmopolis and that preparation had been very minimal ahead of production.

“We didn’t really rehearse much,” said Pattinson, at one point blushing and nervously laughing as he stumbled over some words. “His camera placement totally affected the way I performed. I spent two weeks in my hotel room worrying and confusing myself,” he said. “I called David to talk to him about it [and] I asked him one question, ‘Want to talk about the movie for a bit?’ So I went to his house and he said that it doesn’t matter. ‘Let’s just start and let it happen.’” Pattinson added that the “lyricism and rhythms” of the script had attracted him to Cosmopolis and that unlike other movies he’s appeared in, the script for this project — adapted by Cronenberg — was to be strictly used word-for-word.

“I didn’t want to change any words and [Cronenberg] didn’t want anything changed either,” he said, then adding a quip, “Actors aren’t supposed to be intelligent.”

“It’s like a Bob Dylan song: Everyone knows the words, and you don’t change that,” Cronenberg said. “There are great rhythms to the dialog and you don’t mess with that. Each person who comes into the limo is an additional singer to the choir. If you have a great script, the dialogue gives you so much for the performer.”

Read more of Movieline’s Cannes 2012 coverage here.

[Top photo via Getty Images]

There are a few already on my to-read list: Don DeLillo’s first published collection of short stories, The Angel Esmeralda; Jeffery Eugenides’s long-awaited novel (his first in ten years), The Marriage Plot, and Huruki Murakami’s latest, 1Q84.

I just bought Laura Kasischke’s Space in Chains, and so far it’s all her — ethereal, witty, and organic.

Don Dellilo

“ White Noise”

1984.

“Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word for word, as I work through a sentence.”

— Don Delillo, Mao II (p. 48)

&

“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become … “

— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (ch. 1)

Impact by Douglas Preston (January 5, 2010)

The Godfather of Kathmandu by John Burdett (January 12, 2010)

The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova (January 12, 2010)

Point Omega by Don Delillo (February 1, 2010)

A Dark Matter by Peter Straub (February 9, 2010)

The Man From Beijing by Henning Mankell (February 16, 2010)

Caught by Harlan Coben (March 23, 2010)

A Murderous Procession by Ariana Franklin (April 1, 2010)

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest by Steig Larsson (May 25, 2010)

Beautiful Malice by Rebecca James (August 31, 2010)

What books are you looking forward to in 2010?  Please leave a comment and let me know!

The three people on the book club panel loved the book. They gushed over it, in fact, one suggesting that it might be better understood 50 years from now. Sometimes I wonder if people will be reading at all in 50 years, much less reading novels that had been written 50 years ago. I remember liking the book, what I read of it anyway, but something about the tone seemed to put me off. I don’t know. It almost seemed kind of whiney. And when the book club panel read portions of the book, I didn’t hear the grandness in the prose that they did, although I thought it was well written. In anycase, I can’t not now recall what book I wanted to read instead.

An interesting dichotomy that formed in the discussion involved the two women seeming to focus on the novel as one about a marriage and how it worked and didn’t work, and why marriage fail or succeed, in addition to the novel being set in context with the events of 9/11. While the one man pointed out that the novel was also a sports novel, because it was very much about the game of cricket, which the narrator seems to throw himself into after his wife leaves him.

It made me think about the kinds of stories that I like. If a book is good it doesn’t really matter to me what it is about, but I do tend to prefer stories about youth and youth culture, the lives of people as the struggle toward and into adulthood. Domestic novels, as they are often called, don’t attract me nearly as much. I do  not shun them but if that is what a book is mainly about I’m less inclined to start it at all. There needs to be something else going on in the story.

For example, White Noise by Don Dellilo, which I am currently reading is about a married couple and their children/step-children. In fact, I think for the male narrator this is his 4th marraige, which is a particular kind of dynamic that I like least of all in domestic novels. It just seems to me that there has been an obessive attention to the lives of divorced Boomers, for the most part. Although I am a big fan of Updike who seems to write almost exclusively about that sort of thing. But then he is an amazing writer. White noise is also something Jonathan Franzen calls a systems novel, which he did in an essay in his collection of essays, How to be Alone, which esentiall means that is, at least in part, about the working of the culture or society and what is at play, forces that effect our lives, perhaps in a controlling way, perhaps an ominious way. I like that.

But I’d prefer to read Mary Gaitskill or Douglas Coupland than say, Ann Tyler or Jane Smiley.

Something else I noted during the course of the book club discussion was how the guy on the panel referred at least twice to zombies — being in a zombie-like state, people acting like zombies, etc. This of course stood out for me becaues I have an active interest in zombie stories, movies, etc. Zombies, I think, are to this particualy time, since 2000, what Vampires were to the 80s and 90s. Ann Rice and all that. There seems to be a cultural relevance to the mythology of zombies, the imagery, the nature thereof, etc. I don’t think it is a coincedence that there has been of late an upsurge in zombie movies and books. For my money, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, which won The Pulitzer for fiction and was actually, surprisingly to me, an Oprah book, is at a certain level a zombie novel. In any case, I found the reference intersting.

There was also a reference to a novel that caught my attention. The two women both referred to Desperate Characters by Paula Fox, which was pub’d in 1970 and is set in Brooklyn, New York. Not surprisingly it is a story about a couple, a marriage, and the women both thought it was amazing where the guy had never heard of it. I was intrigued and turns out the library where I work has a copy. So I nabbed. Hopefully, I’ll get around to reading it. It seems to be Fox’s most popular work and was made into a movie in 1971.

At the outset it doesn’t seem like my kind of book, but I’m going to try and give it a try. It’s slim.

ok, this will be quick.

i’m working my way through the new don delillo novel, falling man. the prose is stunned, shattered, exploding, yet calm as an old steady hand. it’s delillo’s meditation on 9/11.

i’m a big fan of delillo’s … mao ii, white noise, and the names all struck me before underworld took the world by storm nearly ten (!) years ago. his work has always been conscious of the everyday blackness of terror and unravelling ancient broken shibboleths in society and human character, and with falling man he’s done his best work since underworld … at least if i use the half of the book i’ve read so far as a judge. his way with language occasionally leaves me frozen in awe.

ok, time for morning coffee and an hour or so with this book before i get on with other things.