white noise

When The Boss Come To Dinner was not at the top of the pile of bedside books. That was White Noise, which I'm reading at last.

And I have just happened to read an annotation of the first page which includes observations on the craft:

...when DeLillo writes, he is trying to nail down something that he already has in his head, or is discovering things as he writes. "I'm always discovering -- I should say, 'frequently discovering' -- things during the act of writing," he says. "I never sketch out anything in advance. At most I have a very, very general idea; I depend on language to produce ideas, to produce characters and stories."

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Comments: white noise

What are you making of "White Noise" so far? I tried reading it last year and wound up throwing it aside in disgust. I was getting irritated with it gradually, but then my eyes lighted upon the sentence "I had never looked at coffee" before and I just snapped.

Oddly enough I made it through all 830-odd pages of "Underworld" with comparatively few difficulties, even if I didn't see why it had to be quite that long...
Posted by James Russell at February 24, 2005 06:05 PM

Quite the reverse, actually.

I found "Underworld" increasingly ... difficult. Love "White Noise" so far. (This may change)I had it reccommended to me years ago - don't know why it took me so long.

I think these things are sometimes as much about timing as anything else.
Posted by boynton at February 24, 2005 06:20 PM

I thought "White Noise" was great - "something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage", "gathered and tended the children" and of course wearing sunglasses to make Hitler Studies sexy.

It and "Libra" are my two favourite Delillos -perhaps because they both have very distinct tones of voice, unlike some of his other works.

Whereas "Underworld" is one of my current books to make plane flights fly by - and it's not really making time fly so far.
Posted by Nabakov at March 1, 2005 12:48 AM

Distinct, and succinct.

Is it the (100?) pages of Baseball in Underworld? I think I could fly through 100 pages of cricket. The 1961 Tied Test or something.
Posted by boynton at March 1, 2005 02:01 PM