White Noise

White Noise is a novel by the American writer Don DeLillo, published by Viking Press in 1985. It is the eighth of his novels and it won the National Book Award for fiction.

Jack Gladney is the professor at the centre of it. He has built a career out of a subject he came to by accident, and he lives in a college town called Blacksmith with his wife Babette and a household made up of children from several marriages.

The novel follows a year in the life of that household, and the year is interrupted by an industrial accident that puts a cloud of toxic material into the air over the town. What follows is an evacuation, and then a long argument with mortality that the characters cannot put down.

DeLillo originally wanted to call the book Panasonic, and he changed the title when the owner of the trademark objected. It is one of the books most often described as a cornerstone of postmodern American writing, and it was adapted into a film in 2022.