As a junior in high school, I first muddled through the minutiae of Don Delillo’s

1985 novel White Noise. It was a summer assignment, and I don’t think I
completely got through the book or I lost my place a couple of times during the last
third of the novel.

It’s hard to call the “Airborne Toxic Event” anything but a climactic moment. I
must have skimmed over the most vivid descriptions on my first reading, because
it was more visually impressive this time around – but, still, somehow I’m numb
responding to the novel like Jack, a teacher and father, is in the face of an
unprecedented, oblique danger. Or his analytical children. I remember commenting
in high school that the whole story felt a little like white noise -- or that the plot
was a little flat. All the real action took place in the distance. The main character
feels kind of impotent when he considers the cloud.

It’s so hard to reconcile the many small observations of life in this novel with the
big sweeping tragedy without feeling a little lost. But the tragedy is hard to
pinpoint, not immediately showing its consequences to human life.

When I was younger, I didn’t have as much frame of reference for sympathizing
with the protagonist’s experiences as a married man, a divorced man, an aging
man, a father, a teacher. Now the plot, developing along the lines of an insular
family dynamic, is much more engrossing to me. It’s insular, but also impossibly
spread out, with children from four marriages to three people coexisting in the
home of a new and childless marriage.

The story takes place before the internet revolution. The novelist playfully applies
principles of physics and relativity to human interaction. Jack sometimes yearns to
better approximate the meaning of the many interactions that compose the real
world he lives in. Then he feels baffled by the messages all around him from
advertising. Today, advertising can weirdly present itself to me on my personal
devices based on my previous-search identity – make itself reflect my life on a day
to day basis.

One of Jack’s daughters, Bee, who doesn’t live with him, visits, and she makes
him feel self-conscious and humiliated. When a stranger comes to observe for a
few minutes – the slice of life is mundane and self-obsorbed, he fears. Though Bee
is young, she is also worldly. He feels embarrassed, but meanwhile the birds chirp
outside. I guess life goes on. Reading this spring, I felt like Jack confessed to a
feeling that was now more familiar to me than it had been when I was a teen.
The protagonist meditates on the dynamics of the family, focusing on critical
observation, he comes to embrace a deep interconnectedness of the family’s
experiences as the people are related to each other and the world around them. At
the same time, he struggles with feeling distant and removed from reality.  

Partly, I wanted to reread the novel to take a look at the detached middle-class,
non-essential worker’s response to an airborne toxic emergency, because in my
experiences with COVID-19 so far, I feel detached from the grimmest realities
people are facing in hot zones and medical facilities. 

Lying low and flattening the curve is a peculiar feeling, and not unlike the
experiences of Jack and his family when they flee from something they can’t fully
avoid, can’t totally grasp, and must place their faith in distant, unknown groups of
people who become an unseen and taken-for-granted necessity. Jack takes for
granted that after the incident passes, research is being conducted to ensure his and
others’ continued recovery and safety, but his wife says events like this happen all
the time. 

A contemporary NY Times review of this novel connects it to a major toxic spill in

India that happened near when the novel was published. It asks in many ways to
consider human rights violations that took place in the German theater of WWII or
the radiation that disturbed Hiroshima and Nagasaki for years afterwards.

I feel somewhat far removed from COVID-19. I’m not in the workplace every day.
I’m one of the people staying home, relying on news reports and gripping
testimonies to make the severity of the situation real. Every day, my attention is
drawn to a new aspect of the disease -- the way it affects seniors, which nations or
cities are in great danger, accepting new methods for homeschooling that baffle me
(how can so many people make the time?), and passing tax forms under a plastic
curtain at the post office. Hearing creepy, sci-fi-esque PSAs from an ultra-calm,
upbeat robot-voice at the hardware store. Wearing masks in public. Fearing to walk
past strangers in enclosed spaces. Waiting to hear more about vaccines. Sighing for
relief when China announces their first day with no COVID-related deaths. 

In White Noise, an elderly woman dies of stress complications days after being
stranded in the middle of a shopping mall with her brother for days, with hundreds
of customers passing her, oblivious to her situation - a harbinger of the terror of the
coming toxic event. After the event, citizens, schoolchildren, participate in disaster
scenario training on the streets. Jack Gladey’s young kids were signed up without
him knowing it. Before he has even wrapped his head around the event - fit it into
his own complex life, the world is returning to normal and responding to the
event. The actions of the disaster response, with people lying in the street in a
designated area behind cords while passers by might see it like it was a movie set –
it feels kind of unclear what their efforts will do to help in the future. Jack
struggles to understand imprecise human behavior.

At home, I am absorbing all kinds of information about coronavirus. Although I

myself am not ill and my phone calls reach healthy friends, my friends are
concerned about racism. They don’t want any collective race to be blamed for
spreading this virus. They are concerned about classism. They don’t want people to
lose their residences because they can’t pay rent right now, even though their
employment has been affected. 

Barak Obama shared his insights into the technology revolution near the end of his
presidency. He was concerned that, “We are siloing ourselves off from each other
in ways that are dangerous.” I can’t forget that a lot the information I have access
to about coronavirus is mostly coming from news from my own circle of friends,
and that people do their best to identify and pass on most relevant information. Not
everyone has access to the technology of communication that I do. Access to
technology amplifies class differences, and even generational differences. But it
also makes me a powerful advocate among my peers. 

In White Noise, the protagonist feels a little stifled by the constant stream of
information in his life. The novel is deeply concerned with information and the
relative uselessness or ludicrousness of a deluge of advertisements and messages
exposed in the light of a major emergency. But it’s also fascinated and
preoccupied... self-afflicted by the constant presence of these messages. Jack’s
family buys the plain, white canned goods just to escape an onslaught of
capitalistic information, but they have radio, magazines. The information simply
can’t be tuned out, and it ends up inserting itself into the plot at key moments -- the
radio or TV always chiming in and demanding that their unrelated information
give a weird and random frame of reference to the domestic failures, deep-seated
fear-driven confessions, or other events. The floating phrases all get knitted into
Jack’s whole life experience. He simultaneously analyzes and experiences. A
whole department at the college is based on the study of advertising. 

The family evacuates their small town, going off the growing physical evidence – a
growing black cloud, a scene visible from their roof – and a fire marshal blaring
instruction from a patrol car, and myriad other sources – TV, radio. Their plan
evolves, and their experienced symptoms evolve as new news reaches them. The
novel makes a diary of a friendship, a marriage and family life, and of the
community response to an airborne toxic event. As Jack puts it: “In a crisis, true
facts are whatever other people say” (116.) The novel appeals to my real method of
information consumption. I’m able to follow the symptoms as if they are
progressing in severity, and assume the news is reporting the most severe reported
symptoms in rapid real-time. And I experience the event with a family that is
isolated and private.

In a middle-American small university town, one of my favorite themes is of

dubious heroism. Jack is a devoted father and husband, and he has invented his
academic field and turned it into a popular area of study. When the event occurs,
he is aware that his family’s response is a little microcosm. His daughter, he
observes, acts like a doctor who doesn’t want to acknowledge their own heroism.
His son comes out of his shell, communicating with authority to a crowd of
evacuees. But essentially, they are alone. He says he feels “Sad for people and the
queer part we play in our own disasters” (122.) His daughters adopt symptoms as
they hear them on the radio. People share information and speculations in a frenzy,
but it doesn’t fundamentally change them or what they are doing. He views the
exchange of information as clusters that form and disperse, something that could
be measured with physics. He is disturbed by the way relativity governs the
significance of everything.

The small steps his family takes, the talk and spread of information, the
speculations that are changing minute-by-minute, spreading all over – its noise,
and on the one hand, it’s maybe misinformation or gossip, but on the other hand,
it’s the substance of Jack’s family life. He doubts it a little bit. He is also grappling
with an overwhelming fear of death. This fear builds slowly to a climax for Jack. A
toxic spill poisons the air, and his exposure leads to nebulous medical readings and
conclusions from doctors.   

But I got excited, like I felt like I was getting to the bottom of something, when
Jack’s best friend Murray finally takes a hand in explaining his fear.  Jack had tried
to talk to his wife, after saying they never talk about it, even though it seemed like
they had. And he and his wife both sought doctors. Jack’s fear intensified after he
was exposed during the airborne toxic event. He confessed to waking in paralyzed
sweats. But unlike so many other things he understands in depth – his children,
who he says you can’t invest too much interest or meaning into their actions, or his
general state of being, his wife’s or his teacher’s or his colleagues’ – he doesn’t
analyze his fear of death.

He lies to doctors. He lives with his wife, and they share the fear – it weighs upon
their marriage. Somehow, Jack’s best friend, who puts his fear of death in terms of
his career, gives the most fulfilling explanation or description of the problem.
According to Murray, Jack has a divided conscience when it comes to his
profession: he is simultaneously hiding out and making something of himself. He
wants to hide his identity by studying someone else’s, but he has also become a
celebrity in his field because of his work. This, Murray claims, is the source of
Jack’s problems and fear.

I really felt like I could relate to this conclusion, because I am now entering into
professional occupations, and don’t have total confidence in what I’m doing
sometimes. I doubt whether my efforts are right or valid. I think it comes from this
rift, like Murray describes. Jack is a little heroic, because he has created a new
field of study, and people are following him. His love for his family and care for
the people in his life makes him more heroic.

Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much
in them, to overindulge your casual gift for the study of character. It is all there, in
full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world
of children. (106)

 When the airborne toxic event occurs, Jack’s son, Heinrich, comes out of his shell,
and he is wearing camouflage, which Jack sees as a “complex meaning for him,
struggling to grow and escape notice simultaneously, his secrets known to us all”
(106.) Evidently, what Murray sees in Jack is not dissimilar to what Jack has
already noticed in his son. Jack says he is in the habit of wearing sunglasses all the
time on campus, “withholding his image.” During the airborne toxic event, Jack
lets his son blossom, which makes it a positive thing. Sometimes that’s necessary,
when events can’t be controlled.

But then, flickers of doubt are cast upon Jack, just a little bit. He’s been studying
Hitler since day one, and I was ok with that, but he wants to learn German, and
then when his conference finally happens, he has his name written in Nazi typeface
over his heart (267). Hitler was supposed to give him something “to grow towards”
professionally, but I begin to realize the repercussions (16.) He’s fascinated with
Hitler’s daily life, and his own daily life is the entire substance of the novel, but
like the creeping fear of death slowly forming an undeniable conflict, as the novel
winds to a climax, I am wondering whether I am about to have undeniable conflict
with the protagonist.

Now, I am reaching the climax of the novel, when Jack is falling into “plotting”
behavior, which he said was what all evil people do, and himself wished to avoid. I
am worried that he is going to commit a murder, which would make it very
difficult to call him a hero still. His desire to conquer his fear of death has become
tangled in with his wife’s. The various lines of plot are all meeting, and I guess I’m
old enough now to better appreciate the psychological tension.

Jack and Babette both love Babette’s young son, Wilder. Through Jack’s asides, I
begin to be concerned about Babette, too, because her son is loved, but he seems to
be delayed in development. He’s too big to be pushed in the cart but he is, and he
can’t talk as well as he should – his vocabulary seems to have stalled (35.) 
Babette’s depression becomes more evident as the text progresses, and she admits
she doesn’t want him to get any bigger. His development is connected with the
family’s experiences – affected by his mother’s and stepfather’s fears. 

The little boy likes to sit and watch the oven and looks and sees a child’s sooty
sock (26.) I think there is no question that resonating themes of toxic gas and Hitler
are a part of Jack’s “American mystery” (59.) And later, unspoken fear of death
between Babette and Jack deepens, and Wilder, staring again at the oven, begins to
cry, and keeps crying for seven hours. I think in some weird, unspoken way,
Wilder’s experiences are all tangled up in Jack’s work. Jack marvels about the
human family, the way it functions as a unit, and shares so much “data.”

Wilder keeps them grounded, according to Babette. And knowing him a little helps
me know the family better, and kind of restores my trust. He is the center of their
lives and is certainly cared for and loved. Grounding is an interesting term, because
the family is always hearing snippets of radio, picking up pieces of information,
and synthesizing them into the family experience. It’s almost like they feel like
they are just a source of information for Wilder to ground.  

Before the big spill, dubiously, a toxic event evacuates the elementary school. Kids
are tasting metal, reporting itchy eyes and a teacher collapses (34.) Someone even
died during the inspection, but the results were “ambiguous” (34.) The family kind
of takes it in stride. They go to the grocery store, and probe among the white
cartons and jars. They are almost copying the activity at the school event
-internalizing it.

Jack takes in the wash “of noise. The toneless systems… a dull and unlocatable
roar…” (35.) The observations in the grocery store show Jack’s external locus of
control. His senses are awake and alert to the “white noise,” but it’s kind of an
overwhelming and numbing experience. The way the family responds to the crisis
is kind of oblique. The girls worry their mother’s gum chewing will harm her. Jack
can’t control his fear of death, but Murray encourages him to “work on your
Hitler” (150.) The family never goes back to the elementary school problem. And
Babette doubts the significance of their airborne toxic event in its wake. She feels
it’s an everyday occurrence, and that people are not studying it with the
earnestness that Jack assumes.

It seems like the whole book invests great care in child-raising and focuses on the
work and outcomes that can be controlled within their daily lives in response to the
tragedy occurring. Even when doing so requires a kind of numb or oblique
relationship with the realities around them, their work takes on new significance,
too. 

Sometimes, the way the novel relates so many experiences together makes
Nyodene D just seem like a microcosm of the at-large problem with carcinogens,
an extra-loud blip in a white noise of fear-causing environmental problems in
society. 

Then, Jack’s studies in Hitler -- considering Hitler’s humanity. He has taken on

such an obtrusive or concrete topic -- seemingly not at all like the endlessly
problematic issues surrounding the poisonous cloud and containing the event. He is
digging into a history, looking at the small details. Like death, Hitler is a
something frightening that I prefer to distance myself from.