Tom’s Reviews > White Noise > Status Update

Jack wakes in the grip of a death sweat. The clock reads 3:51. Jack questions whether death is odd-numbered. He's about to turn 51. He and Babette go to Murray's for dinner. Murray talks about TV. He tells his students they are already too old to figure in the making of society, becoming less recognisable and targetable by the minute. Babette can't remember whether she's taking anything. Everyone is forgetting.

Denise and Steffie argue with Babette about chewing gum. Jack asks Heinrich about the murder he plays chess with. School has closed due to strange goings on; people speaking different languages and getting sick. One of the Mylex-suited men inspecting the problem collapsed and died. There is noise under everything.

The two girls, Jack, Babette and Wilder bump into Murray at the supermarket again. Murray speaks about how the supermarket is like a Tibetan ideal of purgatory. Denise always wears a green visor.

Steffie was holding my hand in a way I'd come to realize, over a period of time, was not meant to be gently possessive, as I'd thought at first, but reassuring.

Jack is preoccupied with but does not speak aloud of death. He has twice now wondered who will die first? Him or Babette? He loves her very much and they spend the night reading erotic stories from adult magazines. Relatable dialogue about pleasing to please.

Good dialogue between Jack and Heinrich about whether it is or isn’t raining.

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?

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.)

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.

“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?"

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.