5/5
Written 31 December 2025
Adapted from my review on Goodreads.
Notes
- From GPT-5:
- White Noise (1985) — This is the starting point for most readers. It’s darkly funny, highly readable, and captures his themes of media saturation, consumer culture, and the contemporary fear of death in a near-perfect way. It’s also structurally tight and accessible without being shallow.
- Think of it as an introduction to his worldview: irony, dread, and absurdity all braided together.
- Pronounced de lil lo
- The tone is almost Murakami-like
- Reads like Norwegian Wood, in that everyday life is just plain unusual from the perspective of a relatively apathetic narrator
- Magical realism without any magic
- Everyday, domestic life, as the narrator ages
- Capital doesn’t wait in a disaster
- A rotting, barely functional, well-past-its-prime middle America
- Abandoned foundries, empty factories
- Empty/boring main streets
- Act I
- Quick, sometimes spare. Short chapters
- Attempt to construct the family/setting from the ground-up
- lol only gets to 36% of the book
- Babette is rather irritating
- Maybe the whole family in general
- Just a complete moron, example of America’s pervasive anti-intellectualism and stupid stupid urges to do stupid shit at inopportune times
- Reading to the blind, but only brain melting tabloids about life after death and shit
- This is why older American adults are on average deeply stupid
- Timeline of death is basically indistinguishable from death by aging
- White Noise…..Feels So Ridiculously Relatable. : r/literature