White Noise

By Don DeLillo

1985

Postmodern Fiction

A postmodern satire centred on Jack Gladney, a professor of "Hitler studies" at a small American college, and his blended family of wives, ex-wives, and step-kids. After a chemical spill releases an "airborne toxic event" over their town, Jack's low-level dread of death becomes acute and crystallises into the novel's central preoccupations — consumerism, media saturation, simulacra, and the human compulsion to deny mortality. Won the National Book Award.