Welcome to America!

BABETTE AND JACK GLADNEY love life, they really do. Everyday they think about living forever. But what if one of them should die before the other? That would be unendurable. So they devise a plan--sort of a mutual assured destruction--and it might have worked until an "airborne toxic event" forced them to evacuate their small college town with their family, tearing Jack away from his cherished position as chairman of the "Department of Hitler Studies" at the local university.

Babette takes drugs but not your average drugs. Responding to a tabloid advertisement--"Live Forever!"--she becomes involved in an illicit experiment, ingesting secret pills to assuage her Fear of the Unknown. Jack is clued into her shenanigans and, typically enough in this novel, confronts her with his suspicions over the kitchen tabl. It is a touchy subject for Babette: "To the best of my knowledge, Jack, I'm not taking anything that could account for my memory lapses. On the other hand I'm not old. I haven't suffered an injury to the head and there's nothing in my family background except tipped uteruses." "You're saying Denise is right." "We can't rule it out." "You're saying maybe you're taking something that has the side effect of impairing memory." "Either I'm taking something and I don't remember or I'm not taking something and I don't remember. My life is either or. Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium steps." "Sounds like a boring life." "I hope it lasts forever," she said.

Nutty? Kooky? Surely, but that's what America is all about in Don DeLillo's White Noise. This book is a paradox: unrelentingly frivolous, its moribund satire of our techno-whizbang pop culture is ultimately depressing. White Noise swirls with the sounds of contemporary life--televisions, radios, appliances, sirens. The Babylon inhabited by DeLillo's samaritans is awash in information, sensation, and objects of diversion but everyone's so numb they don't mind, and they adopt a fusty capitalist attitude respecting their decadence. As one character earnestly asserts. "It makes you proud to be an American: we still lead the world in stimuli."

Don't be fooled by the novel's obsession with death, culture, freedom, sex and sanity. White Noise is not some peevish tabloid revision of 1984. The book never stays sour and it never makes the tiring (because irrefutable) claim that TV has become the average man's Big Brother. Instead, DeLillo writes like a stand-up comedian building variations around a central 326-page-long joke. The media, neo-angst about World War 111, and trendy consumer society constitute one large punching bag, and the deadpanned oneliners seem endless. DeLillo has the greatest sense of the macabre since Poe, although without the ravenous-knock-your-house-down-bury-you-alive doom and gloom.

Witness Jack's seemingly innocent chore of taking out the Gladney garbage: Was this ours? Did it belong to us? I took the bag out to the garage and emptied it. The compressed bulk sat there like an ironic modern sculpture, massive, squat, mocking ... I picked through it item by item, mass by shapeless mass, wondering why I felt guilty, a violator of privacy, uncovering intimate and perhaps shameful secrets. Why did I feel like a household spy? Is garbage so private? Does it glow at the core with personal heat, with signs of one's deepest nature, clues to secret yearnings, humiliating flaws? What habits, fetishes, addictions, inclinations? What solitary acts, behavioral ruts? I found crayon drawings of a figure with full breasts and male genitals. There was a long piece of twine that contained a series of knots and loops. I found a banana skin with a tampon inside. Was this the dark underside of consumer consciousness?

WHITE NOISE is the apotheosis of talk-show patter: every aspect of life is briefly touched upon, from urban alienation to the difficulty of finding good German language lessons, and all are left burnished and gleaming after doing their turn in the Don DeLillo kitschmobile. Where's the beef? Everywhere--shredded like so many ground-up Gainesburgers.

While the vast majority of the book can be grating to those readers who feel glutted after just one or two Merv Griffin Shows, the message one takes away can be quite moving. Embedded in the humor we find a barely suppressed fear: for Jack and Babette the reliance on machinery, drugs and quick answers spells an end to basic human dignity, and all they can think about is dying before they have really lived. And the Cracker-Jack Box prize, the incentive for late night page mongers is DeLillo's dialogue, especially between father and precocious son, or father and ditzy mother.

Take, for example, a whispered conversation between Jack and Babette on the symptoms of exposure to a local "chemical leak":

"Did Steffie hear about déjà vu on he radio, (Jack said).

"She must have."

"How do you know? Were you with her when it was broadcast?"

"I'm not sure."

"Think hard."

"I can't remember."

"Do you remember telling her what deja vu means?"

She spooned some yogurt out of the carton, seemed to pause, deep in thought.

"This happened before," she said finally.

"What happened before?"

"Eating yogurt, sitting here, talking about deja vu."

"I don't want to hear this."

"The yogurt was on my spoon. I saw it in a flash. The whole experience. Natural, whole-milk, low-fat."

WHITE NOISE goes down smoothly, but it leaves the bitter aftertaste we normally associate with paranoia-chic music by David Byrne or Brian Eno. The book is replete with humorous murder scenes, letters to convicts, modern sex, and wiseacre kids. Meet Heinrich, Jack's 14-year-old balding son by a previous marriage: a difficult boy who has one bright moment organizing survival units during the evacuation; he asks his father challengingly, "What is radio? What is the principle of radio? Go ahead, explain. You're sitting in the middle of this circle of people. They use pebble tools. They eat grubs. Explain a radio."

DeLillo has written six other novels, and if they're anywhere near as good as this one he must be used to elaborate critical praise. But he probably wouldn't appreciate learned. NewYork Times Book Review style praise as much as some kind of zany practical joke snuck, into his television set.