White Noise, by Don DeLillo

So after thinking about it for a while I have decided that the whole novel is 'white noise' - it's about things (things debatable, but mostly accepted as being major themes) that are always there in modern (or mid '80s but still issues only in slightly different forms) western (specifically American, but to some degree transferable to others) consciousness but not too often made conscious. This gives the book a sense of unification of theme that turns out not to exist - it goes through stages where one issue seems and overarching thing to unify the whole book but then it's all but dropped for another. Instead, the overarching theme is 'white noise things'. This got to me a little because I'm so pedestrian in basic cognition I like to have a short phrase in my head that I can refer back to, to remember as the thing, so it was a bit jarring, and yet there was still a sense of unification in it all, which I think lies in this idea of exploring things that are white noise - it brings a sense of very quiet foreboding and yet also general uncertainty, including about the reality of the sense of foreboding. I think the only time actual white noise is explicitly acknowledged is when the protagonist is trying to claim his life, break through the figurative white noise.

So it uses a pretty typical framework - just a family, hanging around being a family - with some slight surrealism and/or hyperrealism and/or silliness, to deal with issues that are pretty central to all US postwar satirey stuff. Perhaps it was less super typical - in the issues it deals with - at the time it was written? I do get the sense that it's an important book - though that might mean it popularised the issues?

It was ok, filled with interesting and important issues, I only wish it wasn't so damn short. It should be 1000 pages long or something, not the measly 362 in small pages and large words so that I got through it in two days without even trying very hard. Because it was so short everything was just put out there and glossed over and would have been so much better and so much awesomer to read if it still had all the same things just fleshed out so much more. Things should be fleshed out.