White Noise (42 page)

The men in Mylex suits are still in the area, yellow-snouted, gathering their terrible data, aiming their infrared devices at the earth and sky.

Dr. Chakravarty wants to talk to me but I am making it a point to stay away. He is eager to see how my death is progressing. An interesting case perhaps. He wants to insert me once more in the imaging block, where charged particles collide, high winds blow. But I am afraid of the imaging block. Afraid of its magnetic fields, its computerized nuclear pulse. Afraid of what it knows about me.

I am taking no calls.

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they’d seen the Cream of Wheat. They see no reason for it, find no sense in it. The scouring pads are with the hand soap now, the condiments are scattered. The older the man or woman, the more carefully dressed and groomed. Men in Sansabelt slacks and bright knit shirts. Women with a powdered and fussy look, a self-conscious air, prepared for some anxious event. They turn into the wrong aisle, peer along the shelves, sometimes stop abruptly, causing other carts to run into them. Only the generic food is where it was, white packages plainly labeled. The men consult lists, the women do not. There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge. They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.

“If Don DeLillo has not yet been canonized as the leading
American novelist, then he is just a few quibbles short.
It will happen. The man is brilliant and daring.”

 

 

A young television executive, driven by the power of the image, gives up his job to travel the country with a hand-held movie camera and create a personal version of the American dream.
ISBN 978-0-14-011948-0

 

 

Amid collisions on the football field, a running back becomes fascinated with thoughts of nuclear conflict. As the season progresses, the barriers of language collapse and the games of football and warfare become virtually interchangeable.

 

 

Bucky Wunderlick, rock star and popular icon, becomes jaded with the anti-culture he has created and drops out of society, holing up in a squalid EastVillage apartment. Nightmarish and post-apocalyptic, this is a frightening look into a decaying culture.

ISBN 978-0-14-017917-0

 

 

Don DeLillo creates a complex and passionate novel about Lee Harvey Oswald and the JKF assassination—an event that has indelibly altered the American psyche. Winner of the
Irish Times
International Fiction Prize.
ISBN 978-0-14-015604-1

 

 

A reclusive literary celebrity abandons the failed novel he has been working on and enters a world of political violence. DeLillo’s extraordinary book is an investigation into the relentless power of terror and iconography with “images so radioactive... they glow afterward in our minds” (Michiko Kakutani,
The NewYork Times). Winner
of the PEN/Faulkner Award.
ISBN 978-0-14-015274-6

 

 

The New Republic
calls
White Noise
“a stunning performance from one of our most intelligent novelists.” This masterpiece of the media age is the story of Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies in Middle America, whose life is suddenly disrupted by a lethal black chemical cloud. Winner of the National Book Award.

 

 

Also available in a Viking Critical Library Edition
ISBN 978-0-14-027498-1

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