|
White Noise is pretty widely assigned so I'm sure plenty of people have read it. What did you think of it? How did you react to it when you read it? Personally, I'm not a huge fan. It's a brilliant satire of New Yorker-style academic fiction and the world of academic literature, but ultimately that kind of thing gets somewhat self-referential. At its best moments -- scenes like the daughter's nighttime muttering of "Toyota Celica" -- it's a powerful indictment of and commentary on late-twentieth-century American life. Unfortunately it's hard to to read it in the twenty-first century without thinking "wow, this whole book is chock the gently caress full of first world problems." Even when that inherent banality and triviality is precisely the point DeLillo is getting at, he's still ultimately spending a great deal of time talking about banalities and trivialities. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Apr 15, 2014 |
#
¿
Apr 15, 2014 00:08
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 19, 2024 16:10 |
|
|
AllanGordon posted:I mean a lot of novels could get that thrown at them, but i feel like yeah white noise does talk about this guys failed marriages and failing marriage and his just general malaise in society as one of the main thrusts of the narrative. That's cool I think! And while those may seem trivial and banal looking from outside as a reader I dont see it as something taking away from it. I guess its more about how much you enjoy Delillo's dialogue too since most of the conversations are not about how to save the world from the evil that is Aku. Not to mention that the industrial chemical incident gives a chance for some weightier things to be said/thought about. Yeah, Delillo's writing is masterful and I think that's where the work's merit lies. I'm not saying it's a bad book or anything, just my own personal reaction when I read it a few years ago. Even with the characters' obsession with death, it's almost like the only reason death matters is that it's the only thing that can reliably puncture the giant bubble of privilege the characters live within. Don't get me wrong it's a brilliant book. It's just the sort of book that when I read it I couldn't help but think "wow, this really speaks to the hardships and travails of tenured professors."
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2014 02:31
|
|
|
Stravinsky posted:I thought that was the point though. It is! But even so, I'm still ultimately reading at length about the problems of massively privileged characters, and there's a limit on how much of that I have patience for in a single book. Does layering on the irony and the satire do enough to puncture that bubble? I can see how it would for a lot of readers (maybe most readers?) but when I read it, it came across as a novel that ultimately remains circumscribed within the worldview of the very ivory tower it satirizes. The satire illuminates the academic bubble but never really punctures it, at least from what I remember (again it's been a few years). I should probably give it another chance at some point but my to-read list is long enough these days that I doubt I'll get to it again any time soon. Anyway, I've talked enough -- what did y'all think of it?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2014 03:16
|
|
|
Stravinsky posted:Declan MacManus beat me to it: Yeah, that's a relatively good way of phrasing it. At the time I was hanging out with a lot of literature professors and grad students and read it on their recommendation, but I think it spoke more to them than it did to me. AllanGordon posted:
Judge books by whatever standards you want! I won't judge you for it =) The book was certainly interesting, that's not really it. Just . . . insular rather than universal. It may've been oversold to me. Based on the recommendations I'd gotten, I went into the book expecting a book that spoke to the human condition generally, and instead I felt like I was reading a book that pretty much spoke to the condition of affluent white males in twentieth century American academia. Still interesting, sure, but . . . not Joyce, not Faulkner. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Apr 15, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2014 03:40
|
|
|
dogcrash truther posted:
Oh definitely, that's one of the reasons I picked that moment out. It's hilarious, the prose sets up the joke perfectly, and the joke has a lancet point, too. It's a great moment.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2014 21:25
|
|
|
blue squares posted:You're insufferable. What, is a book only worthwhile if it's about the trials and tribulations of the downtrodden?  That's not even remotely what I was saying. If you're just trying to troll me at least try harder than that. I'll do you the credit of taking your argument seriously, though, since I guess I wasn't being clear. Almost anything might be "worthwhile" depending on what a particular reader wants. White Noise in particular, for me, felt like a self-satirizing take on a genre I've already read a lot of, i.e., books about the life & times of upper middle class white academics. (Compare with, say, Pale Fire). And partly because of that, and partly because it never really seems to transcend that, it just wasn't as interesting as it could have been. It's still funny and it has some truly inspired moments (as above, the Toyota Celica passage is brilliant) but ultimately it's . . . not a book I have a burning desire to re-read. Pale Fire, I'm going to re-read probably at least once a decade. White Noise felt like a read-once. Ultimately, I think White Noise is a good book but one that's over-assigned in college literature classes, for reasons similar to why A Separate Peace gets over-assigned in high school classes. Past that . . . hrm. There's a privilege element here too. A book doesn't have to be "about the trials and tribulations of the downtrodden" to be worth reading, but reading a book like this after the 2008 crisis, when the type of upper-middle-class prosperity it's kvetching about has begun to vanish from the American landscape, it is hard to read this book without the phrase "white people problems" jumping into your head. It was one thing to read this book in the late 80's when the economy was doing well and the students it was assigned to had a decent chance of becoming the academics it satirizes. These days it's a whole different ballgame; the odds of getting a tenure-track position are vanishingly small, and as a result many of the book's jokes (like the obviously unqualified Hitler Studies professor who doesn't even speak German) that were just funny in 1985 are now tauntingly cruel. That doesn't mean every book has to be Les Miserables but this is a book where the changing economic situation seems to almost inevitably change the way it reads. The book's audience and the book's characters used to be in the same economic class; they aren't any more, and that changes things. It used to be self-satire; now it's punching down. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Apr 21, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2014 03:28
|
|
|
wintermuteCF posted:All I can see is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2014 15:27
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 19, 2024 16:10 |
|
|
Stravinsky posted:Hieronymous Alloy maybe you would have a better view of this book if you replaced the words Hitler studies with King Aurthur studies Next time I read it I'll just tell myself that it's actually urban fantasy about the threat of an escaped Air Elemental.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2014 20:18
|
|
