Tom’s Reviews > White Noise > Status Update
Tom
is on page 21 of 375
Babette has a rule where the whole family has to watch television together one night a week. The effect is to de-glamorise the medium in the children’s eyes. (This is just normal now.) The chancellor of the college thinks Jack has to grow into an extra invented initial, J. A. K. Gladney, and become bigger and uglier in order to be taken seriously as an expert in Hitler. (Lots of stuff about weight and eating.)
— 4 hours, 17 min ago
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Tom
is on page 31 of 375
Good dialogue between Jack and Heinrich about whether it is or isn’t raining.
— 3 hours, 45 min ago
Tom
is on page 25 of 375
That night, seconds after going to sleep, I seemed to fall through myself, a shallow heart-stopping plunge. Jarred awake, I stared into the dark, realizing I'd experienced the more or less normal muscular contraction known as the myoclonic jerk.
Is this what it's like, abrupt, peremptory? Shouldn't death, I thought, be a swan dive, graceful, white-winged and smooth, leaving the surface undisturbed?
— 4 hours, 1 min ago
Is this what it's like, abrupt, peremptory? Shouldn't death, I thought, be a swan dive, graceful, white-winged and smooth, leaving the surface undisturbed?
Tom
is on page 16 of 375
We meet Murray. He works for the American environments department. He and Jack (Gladney) go to a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America.
Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.
— 4 hours, 34 min ago
Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.
Tom
is on page 13 of 375
“A woman who harbors a terrible secret. A man with a haunted look. A man who never comes out of his room. A woman who stands by the letter box for hours, waiting for something that never seems to arrive. A man with no past. A woman with a past. There is a smell about the place of unhappy lives in the movies that I really respond to."
"Which one are you?" I said.
"I'm the Jew. What else would I be?"
— Aug 07, 2026 05:52AM
"Which one are you?" I said.
"I'm the Jew. What else would I be?"
Tom
is on page 10 of 375
Jack describes his wife, Babette, ample, with a blond mop, a lover of life unlike his previous wives. They and their daughters from previous marriages have lunch. Heinrich, Jack’s only son, comes in, studies the scene and leaves.
— Aug 07, 2026 05:39AM
Tom
is on page 6 of 375
It is September and our narrator, chairman of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill, is watching the students arrive back on campus, dropped off by their parents in a stream of station wagons.
— Aug 07, 2026 12:21AM