This is the third recommendation I’ve taken this year from my friend Jay, after Snow Crash (which I disliked), and All The Shah’s Men (which I thought was interesting).

White Noise was absolutely incredible. I tore through it in just over three days; the way it picked me up and sucked me in reminded me of my experience last winter with House of Leaves.

But where House of Leaves tries to devastate the reader, White Noise absolutely delights the reader. I felt like I was chuckling almost the whole time. It’s continuously hilarious and surprising, while also being drum-tight and laser-focused on the themes it explores and captures.

The aim of the book is to both indict and trivialize modern consumer culture, as it manifests in our work, in our relationships, and in our supermarkets. The descriptions of super markets are absolutely incredible. There are several of them throughout the book, and I savored and reread each of them.

I was told, a few days before I opened this book, that I have something called supermarket syndrome. Apparently, “The lights, rows of shelves, and crowds of people can trigger symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, and light-headedness.” I know that I can’t stand grocery stores, but I’ve always seen my mental rejection of those spaces as a morally virtuous response to being faced with the enormity of our culture’s overwhelming amount of production and consumption.

From reading this book, it is clear that Don DeLillo shares my perspective.

The book is also an excellent post-COVID read, because it features a community health threat which at first disrupts the lives of everyone in the community, but is then normalized, and then ignored. It’s such a beautiful depiction of how people adapt and move on with their lives, when faced with both trivial and monumental changes of the status quo.

I loved, loved, loved this book, and I highly recommend it.