My initial love affair for this book has waned down, as most relationships do with time. I will blame this on my lover's over-dramatic tendencies, though of its sometimes ludicrous behavior, I was quite fond. I enjoy some silliness here and there.
What I had initially found so attractive was the dialogue - which I still hold in high regard - the author shapes his characters by the things they say rather than the things they do, and I think that's really neat (Even the children are impossibly brilliant...and we all know how much I love unrealistically smart kids). DeLillo really has a talent for engaging, intelligent thoughts and conversations (unpretentiously). Some highlights from the beginning:
-"Where are you living, Murray?"
-"In an old rooming house. I'm totally captivated and intrigued. It's a gorgeous old crumbling house near the insane asylum. Seven or eight boarders, more or less permanent except for me. A woman who harbors a terrible secret. A man with a haunted look. A man who never comes out of his room. A woman who stands by the letter box for hours, waiting for something that never seems to arrive. A man with no past. A woman with a past. There is a smell about the place of unhappy lives in the movies that I really respond to."
(that one might just reflect my own writing style so I'm biased)
and
"I can't help being happy in a town called Blacksmith...I'm here to avoid situations. Cities are full of situations, sexually cunning people...The irony is that I love women. I fall apart at the sight of long legs, striding, briskly, as a breeze carries up from the river, on a weekday, in the play of morning light. The second irony is that it's not the bodies of women that I ultimately crave but their minds...The third and related irony is that it's the most complex and neurotic and difficult women that I am invariably drawn to. I like simple men and complicated women."
and finally,
"...Now she watched him with a tender sympathy, a reflectiveness that seemed deep and fond and generous enough to contain all the magical counterspells to his current run of woe, although I knew, of course, as I went back to my book, that it was only a passing affection, one of those kindnesses no one understands."
Love love.
Everything that I read afterwards about this book really highlighted the topics of commercialism, mass culture, and technology...and maybe that was the intent at the time...but I find those topics to be so base in comparison to the glaring topic of death and emotion. DeLillo randomly scatters these little name-brand groupings at the end of paragraphs throughout the work, and I never really understood why; it didn't seem to be adding anything to the text, and it really just kind of made me think of bullshitting (and forcefully cramming in) concept just for the sake of conceptuality into a work that is otherwise solid.
Is humanity's consciousness and fear of death not a complex enough issue without having to force some outer crap about technology ruining our lives into the mix? Unless this was the intent...to distract and to confuse...but...somehow I don't think it was. SparkNotes says:
"Throughout White Noise, Jack Gladney, the narrator, constantly connects seemingly random events, dates, and facts in an attempt to form a cohesive understanding of his world. Behind that attempt lies a deep-seated need to find meaning in a media-obsessed age driven by images, appearances, and rampant material consumption."
Who knows.
Well now that I've overloaded everyone with a mass assembly of quotations, I will leave you with just one more. Fall has officially arrived in Chicago and it is pitch black at 7:30pm.
"It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things"
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