Reader Score
83%
83% of readers
recommend this book
Then a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives, an "airborne toxic event" unleashed by an industrial accident. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladney family--radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings--pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous.
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Published in 1985, Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” depicted an America blinded by consumerism. Ahead of Netflix’s adaptation of the novel, it’s worth revisiting DeLillo’s masterpiece, which remains one of our most perceptive visions of contemporary America. https://t.co/mT1UUAnoz7
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
"One of the most ironic, intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America . . . [White Noise] poses inescapable questions with consummate skill."
--Jayne Anne Phillips, The New York Times Book Review
"DeLillo's eighth novel should win him wide recognition as one of the best American noveslists. . . . the homey comedy of White Noise invites us into a world we're glad to enter. Then the sinister buzz of implication makes the book unforgettably disturbing."
--Newsweek
"A stunning book . . . it is a novel of hairline prophecy, showing a desolate and all-too-believable future in the evidence of an all-too-recognizable present. . . . Through tenderness, wit, and a powerful irony, DeLillo has made every aspect of White Noise a moving picture of a disquiet we seem to share more and more."
--Los Angeles Times
"White Noise captures the quality of daily existence in media-saturated, hyper-capitalistic postmodern America so precisely, you don't know whether to laugh or whimper."
--TIME
"DeLillo is a prodigiously gifted writer. His cool but evocative prose is witty, biting, surprising, precise . . . White Noise [is] arguably [his] best novel."
--The Washington Post
"Its brilliance is dark and sheathed. And probing. In White Noise, Don DeLillo takes a Geiger-counter reading of the American family, and comes up with ominous clicks."
--Vanity Fair
"A stunning performance from one of our most intelligent novelists . . . Tremendously funny."
--The New Republic
"DeLillo's love and flair for language unite to tell us [...] something discomforting about mortality and something profound about the way we deal with it. It may be a novel superabounding with words, but none of them are wasted."
--The Guardian