White Noise follows events surrounding a Midwest college professor, with much attention given to his family, a Brady Bunch-type arrangement. Our professor, Jack Gladney, is known for his unique academic departmental creation, Hitler Studies; this bit matters because it embodies a major theme in the novel: information overload--how each and every thing is problematized and probed and its hidden data and meaning is wrung out, spilling out into the air. Each source is inexhaustible, but ultimately, exhausted, you wonder whether all this data mining yielded knowledge or pollution.The novel's action and dialog is immersed in data: trivia, reports, news, questions, answers, rhetorical questions, interrogations, analysis, meta analysis, educated guesses, second guesses, and so on. In the narrative, this information overload is symbolized by a toxic cloud that materializes over the town after a train wreck and chemical spill. The threat prompts a second theme (also represented in the cloud): fear of death. Jack Gladney is exposed to the cloud for perhaps too long and a fear of death sets in. But, after the real toxic cloud dissolves in microbiotic fury, Gladney learns his wife has struggled with an intense fear of death for months, and that she even sought help for it through an obscure, experimental pharmaceutical trial, taking pills to cure the fear. After dragging along these plot points for a time, at the end, out of nowhere, the novel takes a bizarre twist involving a murder attempt.
The characters are unrealistic and unlikable, each taking turns dismissing whatever the other characters choose to dwell on. They are all stupid quirky buffoons with no bullshit threshold. The cloud event is ridiculous because it starts out catastrophic but is quickly dealt with and rarely mentioned again. Gradually, during the reading I lost all motivation to consider the novel seriously.
Notes:
- The novel says nothing about it, but "information overload" might be one of those fears that pops up every couple generations.
No comments:
Post a Comment