I finished Don DeLillo’s White Noise last night. While it wasn’t a bad book by any means, I wasn’t taken by it in any specific way. DeLillo does well to tweeze out the meaning of death, but fails to enthrall me with it. I recognize the importance of the book in context of DeLillo himself and the greater social fears of death, however, it was a slow start, a slow plod, and a muddled ending that ended up feeling more rushed and wordy than need be. It was as if DeLillo was attempting to spit out all his ideas into the last 50 or so pages.

I’m not sure how to put it. I get what DeLillo was writing about. I was just so bored every time I sat down to read. Babette and Heinrich were the only characters who intrigued me, but that was because they were actually interesting people within the novel. Jack, the main character, felt like a blithering idiot. In thinking about it, I think I disliked Jack the most because a lot of his inner monologue felt very close to mine, and that terrifies me.

But back to death. It’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere. It is an inescapable force and it looms around us all day. No matter what preparations and precautions we make and take, death still happens. I’m not exactly a fatalist, but death doesn’t worry me. We live until we die. So it goes. I’m more of a day-to-day living sort of dude. DeLillo’s writing and characters micro-manage death. They try to compartmentalize it, cut it up, study it. There are some things in our world that should simply be accepted, and let alone.

Perhaps I’ll have to re-read it later on life, maybe when death looms on my mind more (at this point in my life, I find death to be fascinating more than anything else).

I already wrote some thoughts earlier on DeLillo’s book Americana, which I was stunned by. I plan on reading more DeLillo in the future, but am going to take a break from him and move into Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections.

PS: I wrote this while listening to Queen. Maybe that’s why I’m not afraid of death. Queen quells all fears.