White Noise
Don DeLillo(1985)
Extract
The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus.
A professor of Hitler studies at a Midwestern college watches a black chemical cloud drift across the sky and feels, for the first time, that death might actually mean him. Don DeLillo published this novel in 1985, and it has only grown more prophetic: the supermarket as temple, the television as oracle, the pill that promises to cure the fear of dying. Jack Gladney narrates with bewildered precision, cataloguing brand names and disaster footage with the same flat attentiveness, because in this world there is no hierarchy of meaning, only ceaseless noise. The novel is very funny and very frightening, often in the same sentence. It understood before anyone that consumer culture was teaching us not to stop fearing but to fear in new ways.
If you loved this
Camus writes the same fear of death, but in a world before consumerism offered to anaesthetise it.
Wallace inherits DeLillo's America of media saturation and asks whether sincerity can survive in it.
Kundera circles the same dread of meaninglessness, but with European philosophy instead of American supermarkets.