White Noise
Jack Gladney chairs the department of Hitler studies at a small college, cannot stop wondering whether he or his wife will die first, and then a rail accident releases an airborne toxic event over the town. DeLillo's National Book Award comedy about the fear of death in an age of images: supermarkets, screens, simulated evacuations, and the static of American life that gives the book its name.
Everyone in it talks like DeLillo: the professors, the children, the men at the supermarket, all delivering aphorisms in the same cool cadence. The satire of academia has been photocopied so often the original can read like the parody. The plot thins badly in the final third, and readers who need people rather than positions will find the Gladneys a debate club wearing a family's clothes.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
