Clutter

Well, after one false start, I'm finally actually reading White Noise. I read the first page about a week and a half ago, put it down, and decided I didn't absolutely have to pick it back up again. So I didn't. But today I went back to it and read a little further, and by page 26 I was sold.

It's a very difficult book to concentrate on, which surprised me until I thought about the nature of the book. The title alone implies a constant, insidious envelope of sound, a distraction that one can never be free of. The blurb on the back speaks about Jack and Babette navigating "the usual rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism." A chemical cloud represents "the 'white noise' engulfing the Gladney family - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings - pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous." Hence the difficulty I'm having concentrating on the actual book. I think once I get more into the swing of things and feel more connected to the characters, the initial distraction will go away. But I can't help wondering if this is somehow purposeful. Did DeLillo want to make the reader aware of the postmodern chaos of the world he had created by constructing a narrative designed to make the reader feel a bit ADHD himself? The short chapters add to the scattered, unfocused feel of the narrative, as the novel jumps from one thought to another, one character to another, one place to another, with no transition or conciliatory nods to the reader's need to be handled gently when entering this world.

There also seems to be almost too MUCH meaning packed into everything. The novel is very dense. Everything seems equally significant and insignificant - the clutter is meaningless, but in its very meaninglessness, it takes on a meaning, providing a metaphorical way to examine the culture that so carelessly produces it.

I like thinking about clutter, because it's something that's concerned me for some time now. Sometimes I find myself voluntarily being distracted by something - TV, instant messaging, food, online shopping, blogs, etc - and realize that it would be all too easy to lose yourself in a world of such distractions and never return to the thing that you were originally distracted from.