White Noise

Don DeLillo

Apr 2016 · Simon and Schuster · Narrated by Michael Prichard

About this audiobook

Now a Netflix film!

Winner of the National Book Award, White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultra­modern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an “airborne toxic event,” a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the “white noise” engulfing the Gladneys—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous.

Ratings and reviews

bad- I was forced to read this book for a pilot but it is one of the very few books that if I had The Choice to not finish I would not finish because nothing seems to matter and the plot doesn't work congruently and the things that they put emphasis Overshadowed by other events in the book. It does have interesting references to society and how easily we get distracted but overall the Character building doesn't work coherently. It's the author decides that something should happen even if it doesn't make any sense with the rest of the book he will just make it happen and it is completely pointless and annoying and obnoxious.

I wanted to like this book, and I probably would have, but the voice talent is very distracting. As opposed to reading literature it sounds more like he's announcing trains arriving at a station. DeLillo deserved better.

About the author

Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including White Noise, which was made into a Netflix film, Libra, Underworld, Falling Man, and Zero K. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2013, DeLillo was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and in 2015, the National Book Foundation awarded DeLillo its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.