Don DeLillo's White Noise: a novel way of dismantling consumerist excess

DeLillo’s flair with language paints a picture of a strange world, where the holy trinity – ‘Mastercard, Visa, American Express’ – distracts from our mortality

Don DeLillo is a writer in love with words. He’s often spoken about the almost physical pleasure he takes in putting black on white, in banging out syllables on his noisy old typewriter, of watching sentences take shape in front of him. He delights in the ebb and flow of language, in riding a lulling rhythm and also in disrupting that rhythm. The sudden shorter sentence. He also just seems to enjoy words for their own sake. Their quiddity; you get the impression that he revels in the fact that if he writes “shoe”, you’ll immediately think of the thing you wear on your foot. He loves to itemise, to catalogue, to amplify.

In White Noise, he does so to fine effect. This novel bursts with language. Most obviously, the early chapters are full of long, exuberant lists. There’s a typically fine example on the very first page:

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