Introduction by Richard Powers ix White Noise 1 Introduction The Whiteness of the Noise On a bright April morning thirty years ago, I stood on the balcony of my upper-story apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, looking out on a plume full of ten thousand gallons of deadly phosphorus trichloride that rose hundreds of feet into the air, listening to the television spew a steady stream of dire speculation, and wondering whether to head in to work or call in sick. Five years later--just weeks after a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, released almost 100,000 pounds of methyl isocyanate into a densely populated area, killing many thousands of people--I picked up a just-published novel whose "airborne toxic event" triggered a broad spectrum of symptoms including heart palpitations and an intense feeling of déjà vu. The publication of White Noise in 1985 placed Don DeLillo at the center of contemporary cultural imagination. I can think of few books written in my lifetime that have received such quick and wide acclaim while going on to exercise so deep an influence for decades thereafter. I can think of even fewer books more likely to remain essential guides to life in the Information Age, another quarter century on. As a result, like the book''s "MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA," this relentlessly pored-over masterpiece of "American magic and dread" faces the risk of death by promotion to Classic. Yet even after twenty-five years, White Noise remains deeply disconcerting, prophetic, hilarious, volatile, enigmatic, and altogether resistant to containment or antidote. The world of Jack Gladney, his colleagues, and his family grows more estrangingly familiar, more recognizably alien with every subsequent cultural bewilderment.

The book''s surface seductions are clear enough. Its dizzying kaleidoscope of genre parodies--domestic intrigue, Kmart realism, pulp disaster, psychological thriller, obsessive crime fiction, cycling nouveau roman--begins with a send-up of an academic novel and quickly plunges into dysfunctional family sitcom. From page one, DeLillo captures the drop-dead hysterical terror of the human cortex in full flight. Every thought, every traded commodity of tottering words passed between the members of this ad hoc family--Jack and Babette Gladney and their four "children by previous marriages," with walk-ons by half-sibs, wayward parents, and semi-ex spouses--teeters on the brink of dada. The makeshift Gladney clan raises its monument to unhinged information in a place somewhere between the Sunnis and the Moonies, Tennessee Ernie Williams and Sir Albert Einstein, a land where "forgetfulness has gotten into the air and water [and] entered the food chain." No part of the Way We Think Now escapes skewering, and the Gladneys'' demented family chatter--the torrent of "true, false, and other kinds of news"--threatens to pulp the mind of even the idle listener. Burlesque so merciless--the page-after-page pleasure of collective humiliation--could, all by itself, keep such a book thriving long after most of its coevals are on life support. But DeLillo''s mordant satire of the fissile and refused nuclear family serves only to launch his surprising care for these "fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts.

" In the overload of deranged Gladney babble, Jack marvels at the "colloquial density that makes family life the one medium of sense knowledge in which an astonishment of heart is routinely contained." And I marvel, too, on this late rereading, at a naked earnestness hiding inside a style that I years ago mistook for pure postmodern irony. Or rather, the marvel lies in that sound of human speech hungering for a time before irony and earnestness split into two strangers that deny their shared genes. What shocks me now is the book''s terror-stricken tenderness. With whiplashing jump-cut between lampoon and compassion, DeLillo turns a hilarious domestic travesty into one of the great, unlikely family romances of the past hundred years. "Watching children sleep," Jack says, in a moment that peels contemporary cool back to its hottest core, "makes me feel devout, part of a spiritual system. It is the closest I can come to God." Alongside that surprise warmth, the book''s brutal accuracy has kept it current far beyond the moment when the best pure satire would have dated and staled.

DeLillo''s ear astounded me a quarter of a century ago; now it seems almost otherworldly in its resolution. On every other page, he''s hearing the universe in all its subaudible frequencies. He retains everything; it''s as if Borges''s Funes, the man who forever remembers the slightest detail and minute change in angle, has taken a stroll around Anytown, USA, and retired to a cork-lined room to assemble the terabyte streams of waves and radiation into a panoramic survey. The inspired set-pieces of familial and academic babble read less like grotesque parodies than as exact replicas--the déjà vu symptoms of toxic residue, perfectly recorded simulations of waking dreams. We''ve all had those crazed conversations, all been bombarded by that exact static of shared inanity and never fully heard the soundtrack until DeLillo transcribed his high-gain recordings. Read the book, and you can''t escape hearing all the old, overly familiar daily blare with new ears. "I realized the place was awash in noise," Jack Gladney says of the supermarket, that pilgrim''s chapel of the commodified world that cradles him like an innocent in the grip of a bipolar and raucous God. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children.

And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension. But if the aisle is full of noise, it''s also teeming with signals. Jack''s colleague Murray serves up a paean to that same deafening supermarket: This place recharges us spiritually, it prepares us, it''s a gateway or pathway. Look how bright. It''s full of psychic data.Everything is concealed in symbolism, hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material.All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering, rearranging, peeling off the layers of unspeakability.

That same tone of Gnostic wonder infuses the book, weaving a counterpoint around the Gladneys'' unshakable fear of death. Wonder and fear: the two incommensurate human emotions strike and collide, throwing off sparks that might equally well burn or warm. Secret messages float everywhere through the town of Blacksmith, filling the air with disembodied product names and ad copy liturgies. Jack''s sleeping child--that closest approach to God--chants the now-famous shibboleth, Toyota Celica, two words that strike her listening father "like the name of an ancient power in the sky.a moment of splendid transcendence." How are we to take this startling pronouncement? Is it bleak, defeated mockery or genuine spiritual prayer? White Noise pushes down into a primal place, toward the parent impulse beneath both awe and terror. As Jack puts it, after the Airborne Toxic Event drives his family away from every former safety, "Our fear was accompanied by a sense of awe that bordered on the religious." These pages are littered with such spiritual impulses.

Throughout the book''s three arched parts, dread and dread''s send-ups sink Jack Gladney deeper toward life''s central mystery. I''m struck, in reading a work that has become synonymous with grim postmodernism, one that so perfectly nails the Zeitgeist of the past-stripped present, by how often the book employs the word "ancient." DeLillo has described this novel as an attempt "to find a kind of radiance in dailiness. Sometimes this radiance can be almost frightening. Other times it can be almost holy or sacred." Yes, the book is a condemnation of somnambulist, consumerist co-optation, a savage look at the epileptic brainstorm induced by broadcast culture. But its full achievement may lie in its connection, underneath the litanies to Waffelos and Kabooms, with the long past. Something in co-opted consciousness is still stabbing away, trying to find forever.

Even the "narcotic undertow and eerie diseased brain-sucking power" of television is, according to Murray, filled with coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras. "Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it." The medium practically overflows with secret formulas if we can remember how to respond innocently and get past our irritation, weariness and disgust. Maybe this cabalistic rapture is just more of DeLillo''s academic burlesque, a death-rattle chuckle in the back of his throat as the billowing gas cloud rolls over us. Or maybe he puts forward Murray''s hymn with all the sincerity of Saint Augustine. As with all great narrative art, White Noise suggests polarly opposed readings that nevertheless do not negate each other. For me, the book''s brilliance lies not just in its castigation of commodity culture but in its portrait of the magic, cult religiosity that drives that culture--the brain''s sacramental impulse to create all this stuff and noise in the first place. Only a short, blocked loop stands between consumption and consummation, between a chanted product name and the world''s re-enchantment.

Our tidal wave of toxic informentation means something, if only in revealing us. The landfills of escalating material miracles that we industriously amass form, in themselves, the most significant monument to our sickness unto death. At the book''s heart is the naked question: what to do with a fear of death that leaves every human action doomed and pathetic? The story''s "routinely.