Often hailed as the quintessential exemplum of Reagan-era postmodernism, Don DeLillo's eighth novel, White Noise (1985), is part academic satire, part media excoriation, and part exploration of the "simulacrum" or simulated feel of everyday life. With its absurdist asides on the iconicity of both Elvis and Hitler, the unrelenting stress of consumer choices (the supermarket is the site of modern neuroses), and the pharmacopic management of anxiety, the novel can sometimes feel a little smirky, a little too self-consciously zany, in its treatment of 1980s' suburban life. But readers interested in what DeLillo has to say about the emotional connections between husbands and wives and fathers and children will find a deeper, more somber effort to de-clutter the static of misinformation systems and chemical controls, whether in the blood or in the air, to forge organic bonds. To call White Noise the Babbitt of the "Greed is Good" era is no slight---DeLillo may have written better and more important books (including Libra, his treatment of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination) but this is the novel that best captures the weird unease of the second-to-last decade of the twentieth century.
Episode 26: Seekers of the Lonely Heart: Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Episode 25: Surmising the Motives in Henry James's THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
Episode 24: Speeding Down the Highway with PLAY IT AS IT LAYS by Joan Didion
Episode 23: Hearing Voices in William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING
Episode 22: Rambling Along the REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
Defining Dignity through Service in Ernest J. Gaines' A LESSON BEFORE DYING
Episode 20: Cracking Through the Scrub with THE YEARLING
Episode 19: Riding the Rocket with Thomas Pynchon's GRAVITY'S RAINBOW
Episode 18: We Want to Fly Away with Chopin's THE AWAKENING
Ep 17: Pursuing the Picaro in Saul Bellow's THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH
Episode 16: Classics of American Noir
Searching for the Ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH
Episode 14: Ride into the sun--Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN
Homing in on the Prairie with Willa Cather's My Ántonia
Episode 12: Hitting the Road with LOLITA
The Everyday Ecstasy of Marilynne Robinsone's GILEAD
Episode 10: Finding the Lost Generation in Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES
Episode 9: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Episode 8: Beloved and Ghosts of the Past, the Present, and Possibly the Future
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
50 Tastes Of Gray
Dear Alice | Interior Design
Spider-Man Crawlspace Podcast
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Anne of Avonlea
The Magnus Archives
The Moth