Wood was not wrong when he excoriated Underworld, because he felt the massive sweep of the novel and the paranoid pitch of its warning about conspiracies served as their own kind of conspiracy to silence people and culture, much in the same way that DeLillo feels the conspiracies that drive real history do. White Noise’s lampooning of academic hairsplitting is as funny as it is pointed, but too often the novel’s register is so abstruse that it sounds sympathetic to rather than derisive of the academics who view ”cereal boxes as the only avant-garde we’ve got left.” The problem is that DeLillo is so intent on his cerebral musings and his prophetic register - all omens and portents - that he doesn’t seem to understand his subjects are more often than not unequal to both. Or worse, a parody of DeLillo himself.īut the problem with DeLillo’s style is not inherent to it. Too often the result is a kind of parody DeLillo at his most indulgent sometimes sounds like a cheeky college student’s riff on Baudrillard. In neither case does he reveal the esoteric facets hiding in fixtures of modern life so much as override their mundanity with a vaguely religious aura they never deserved. In both cases, DeLillo has chosen to expound at length on his own mystical interpretation of consumer culture and yet in both cases he has settled on illustrative examples that do not match his own lofty thoughts. Or the moment in Underworld when waste management specialist Brian Glassic comes to stare at the Staten Island landfill and fancies himself a “member of an esoteric order… adepts and seers, crafting the future…” Recall Murray’s monologue about the religious importance of supermarkets in the early pages of White Noise, how “everything is concealed in symbolism… how well-lighted everything is… sealed off… timeless”, and how this “inevitably makes (him) think of Tibet”, where “dying is an art”. DeLillo himself has argued that he wants to “impart a sense of the magic and dread lurking in consumer culture”, and his style seems cultivated to do exactly that. The literary critic James Wood once described Don DeLillo as “a didactic writer who wants to be honored for not being one.” (“Against Paranoia: The Case of Don DeLillo”, The Broken Estate, 1999) In a way this criticism rings fair.

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