Number 9! White Noise or Audible Groans!

                                                  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Brady_Bunch_full_cast_1973.JPG

                                            Huh…… White Noise?

                    No need to worry about spoilers; I will only be commenting on part one and two.

Part one is separated into 20 chapters consisting mostly mundane day to day life stuff, some character descriptions and quirks. Nothing resembling a plot happens in part 1. It is all set up until part 2. DeLillo does a pretty good job of fleshing out characters; Every time Murray makes an appearance my stomach turns. You must be a good writer if you can make someone reading your book physically ill. I find most of the other characters less disgusting. The Narrator and main character is Jack Gadney. Jack is a Hitler Expert, has three children from two previous marriages. He is currently married to Babette a sugar-free gum addict, with sporadic memory loss and three children of her own. So Jack and Babette are exactly like Mike and Carol Brady from the Brady Bunch! Except Jack has two daughters and one son and Babette has two sons and one daughter.  I guess this means that creep Murray is Alice. Only two of Jack’s children live with him and Babette, Steffie and Heinrich. Steffie appears to get upset when a plane crash happens on the TV while the rest of the crew cheers and guffaws; she wears a green tinted golf visor all the time. Heinrich is an annoying creepy balding fourteen year old, He is pen pals with a psycho killer he has phone calls with mysterious folk about incest and babbles on for pages about whether rain is wet or not. Bee is Jack’s 12 year old daughter, she doesn’t spend much time in the book because she is busy being a globetrotting crime fighter. Babette’s three children are Eugene, Denise and Wilder.  Eugene is in Australia, Australia was really popular in the 80’s. Denise is the resident girl detective; she is always snooping around and trying to figure out what kind of drugs her mom is hopped up on. Wilder is either a half-wit mute or a baby I haven’t figured it out yet, his shining achievement is he is too big to ride in the shopping buggy and he can cry for 24 hours straight. The only other character worth mentioning is Murray. I don’t even know where to start with this horrible abomination, he works at the same college as Jack, he doesn’t like cities because cities are full of hot sex, he likes to sniff things, he lives in a slummy boarding house because he enjoys human misery, he doesn’t seem to understand personal space. This guy is a grade A creep. In a way the TV is a character in part 1; at several points something said on the TV seems to add to a conversation that the other characters are having. I could swear TV is talking about Bee when it says “The creature has developed a complicated stomach in keeping with its leafy diet” (DeLillo 95).

Part two or the thing with three names! Heinrich is on the roof being a weirdo and spots the cloud of smoke. The radio informs them to evacuate the town and get to the safe zone. The cloud of smoke with an identity crisis chases the family across snowy roadways until they get to the emergency shelter. At the shelter Babette reads stupid tabloid papers for almost four solid pages of the book. Jack hangs out with Jehovah’s witnesses and learns what crazy people think about the end of the world. Heinrich does a stand-up comedy routine and the rest of the crew sleeps. But be warned you aren’t getting out of part two without a little cameo by Murray! Here we see Murray in his natural habitat a parking lot propositioning prostitutes in a van. This is the first time I have encountered ipecac in written word form.  The next day they are told the cloud is a heading right for them. The family receives complimentary dust masks and then they follow some hillbillies through a snowy forest. Jack and company arrive in Iron City and hang out in a Dojo (Karate was also big in the 80’s).  

This book is interesting so far. There are a few big criticisms I have. Is it really necessary for two characters to argue over who should die first for over a page on two separate occasions? Just because the author has the uncanny ability to mimic the kind of argument an annoying teenager would come up with doesn’t mean he should. I have never thought about college professors sitting around and talking about shitting, pissing and James Dean until now! I don’t know how much of this stuff will come up later in the story but it seems like excessive amounts of nonsensical filler. I don’t relate to any of the characters. The author has some strange obsession with shopping malls, grocery and hardware stores and describes them very vividly. I have no idea what this story is about so far. My only guess is it’s about mid-life crisis and the assorted horrors of parenting.

I am a fan of audiobooks I find that sometimes I hear something that I missed when I read through.