Looking to start reading Don DeLillo, or already a fan and looking for ways to persuade your friends, relatives, or students to finally access the wonders of White Noise? In Episode Twenty, DDSWTNP offer an introduction to White Noise for the first-time reader of DeLillo, focusing on elements of plot, action, character, humor, and voice that often present stumbling blocks to initiates. We help listeners navigate DeLillo’s most popular novel, the “gateway drug” to the joys and challenges that a lifetime of reading his corpus holds in store. We also answer key questions like how to regard Hitler Studies and whether you need to know anything about “postmodernism,” philosophy, or how a media theorist might read the Most Photographed Barn in America before entering DeLillo’s world (spoiler: no!). Longtime listeners to the pod will find here, we hope, an episode to send along to anyone they’ve given a copy of White Noise for Christmas or ever told, “Hey, you should read Don DeLillo.” The first of several episodes to come from us on White Noise as the novel turns 40, this podcast will be followed in 2025 by our deep dives into the novel itself, its massive body of criticism, and the recent film adaptation – so stay tuned, and may you be immensely pleased.

First-time readers of White Noise looking for illuminating critical and contextual reading should try some of the essays and excerpts collected in Mark Osteen, ed., White Noise: Text and Criticism (New York: Penguin, 1998), as well as the many excellent resources at Curt Gardner’s website “Don DeLillo’s America” (http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html). But as we suggest in the episode, mainly we advise just going back and re-reading all your favorite scenes, or even the whole thing!

In Episode Nineteen, DDSWTNP turn outward to a discussion of Rachel Kushner, whose Booker Prize-nominated Creation Lake, a 2024 novel about the folly of espionage, revolutionary violence, life underground, and confronting modernity with ancient practices in rural France, solidifies its author’s reputation as a key inheritor of DeLillo’s influence and themes. Creation Lake is narrated by a nihilistic spy named Sadie Smith who infiltrates a farming commune called Le Moulin and grows enchanted with the claims of their cave-dwelling philosophical advisor, who argues that Neanderthal life thousands of years ago holds the key to reshaping humankind. In it Kushner explores the legacy of France’s 1968 while echoing The Names, Great Jones Street, Ratner’s Star, Mao II, and other DeLillo works, as we outline in our discussion. We find rich references as well in Creation Lake to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joan Didion, Michel Houellebecq, and Kushner’s own previous works, especially The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room. Listeners looking for new writing reminiscent of DeLillo and those already knowledgeable of Kushner’s works will find plenty here, and we hope this episode will be the first of several over time dedicated to DeLillo’s massive influence on exciting new world literature.

Texts and quotations mentioned and discussed in this episode, in addition to Creation Lake and those by DeLillo:

Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (1970) and Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

Dana Goodyear, “Rachel Kushner’s Immersive Fiction,” The New Yorker, April 23, 2018 (includes discussion of Kushner’s friendship with DeLillo)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin (2019)

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (2013) and The Mars Room (2018)

---. “Rachel Kushner: ‘The last book that made me cry? The Brothers Karamazov,” The Guardian, October 5, 2018 (source of this answer: “The book that influenced my writing: Probably novels by Joan Didion, Denis Johnson and Don DeLillo. But a whole lot of other books, too”)

“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)– a line mangled slightly in the episode)

In Episode Eighteen, DDSWTNP wish our author a happy 88th birthday and talk about the international life he led between the mid-1970s and early 1980s. We follow DeLillo abroad, covering his year in Canada (1975) and his much-discussed time living in Athens (1978-1982), tracing influences of these experiences on portrayals of national identity and language in The Names especially but other works too. Central to understanding this period is the powerful change in method that DeLillo made at his manual typewriter that inspired slower, more “serious” work. For those who already know the biography pretty well we also have in this episode some surprising details garnered from his letters in these years to editor and friend Gordon Lish, the remarkable story of DeLillo’s response to a Utah banning of Americana in 1979, and connections between the 1981 Athens earthquakes DeLillo lived through and the 1988 short story “The Ivory Acrobat.” We end by considering the “toxic spill” of the news that greeted DeLillo on his return to America in 1982 and energized the writing of White Noise, and we announce too some upcoming episodes that will close out 2024!

As is often true, we get significant help in this episode from interview excerpts and more collected at Don DeLillo’s America: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html

Texts referred to and quoted from in this episode:

Ann Arensberg, “Seven Seconds” (1988), in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 40-46.

Adam Begley, “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306.

Don DeLillo, The Engineer of Moonlight, Cornell Review 5 (Winter 1979), 21-47. [Incorrectly placed in Epoch in episode.]

---, “The Ivory Acrobat,” Granta (Issue 108, 1988) (and collected in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories).

Robert Harris, “A Talk with Don DeLillo” (1982), in DePietro, ed., 16-19.

Gordon Lish Manuscripts (1951-2017), Lilly Library, Indiana University (https://archives.iu.edu/catalog/InU-Li-VAC9786).

Mervyn Rothstein, “A Novelist Faces His Themes on New Ground” (1987), in DePietro, ed., 20-24.

Jim Woolf and Dan Bates, “Davis Official’s Action Dismays, Horrifies Author of ‘Americana.’” The Salt Lake Tribune, August 31, 1979.