In January 1985 Don DeLillo published a novel that achieved a rare hat-trick: the highest sales of his 14-year career, adulatory reviews and an enhanced reputation in any university English department interested in postmodernism – which in 1985 was all of them. Ten months later it won the National Book Award. According to the novelist Richard Powers, White Noise “placed Don DeLillo at the centre of contemporary cultural imagination. I can think of few books written in my lifetime that have received such quick and wide acclaim while going on to exercise so deep an influence for decades thereafter.” Now approaching 40, it re-enters the culture in the form of Noah Baumbach’s $80m Netflix film adaptation. Will this version establish itself at the centre of our cultural imagination? Certainly not, although that has nothing to do with its quality; it’s because there is no centre now – something the decentred, fragmentary work of DeLillo, a noun rarely positioned far from the adjective prescient, saw coming a long way off.
White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney (played by Adam Driver in the film), a professor of Hitler Studies at College-on-the-Hill, a small liberal arts university in the American Midwest, his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), who teaches posture and reads tabloid newspapers to the blind, and their large post-nuclear family: seven children from six different marriages and relationships, none of them both Jack and Babette’s. The film alters this last fact, making the youngest child theirs, implying a solidity to their marriage that the book withholds and providing an early clue that this might be a more reassuring ride than its source text.
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