Don DeLillo began his career writing thriller-like books in the 1970s, when that motherlode of thriller material, the Cold War, was nearing its crescendo. I remember seeing his books in the early 1980s, but I brushed past them, seeing nothing in their marketing to make them stand out from usual thriller fare. This, of course, is the fate of any new writer. Marketers plug each new writer into a genre, and the writer must choose whether to live in this box (which if you're Sue Grafton or Danielle Steel, can be quite a plush box indeed) or somehow try to trick the marketers and pull off an escape.

Behind those lurid thriller-covers of his early books, DeLillo was already escaping the thriller genre, and finding his voice as a major novelist, but it took a clean break to bring him into focus. As his favorite topic, the Cold War, was nearing its climax, DeLillo abandoned this reliable crutch and wrote White Noise, a breakthrough novel that nobody could mistake for a thriller. It remains his happiest and yet most frightening book.

When a novel seems to belong to several genres at the same time, or to none at all, you may well be in the presence of greatness. White Noise is such a presence. It seems, at first, to be academic satire. What else can you think when the first-person hero, Jack Gladney, lays out the facts of his profession on the second page?

I am chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. I invented Hitler studies in North America in March of 1968. ... When I suggested to the chancellor that we might build a whole department around Hitler's life and work, he was quick to see the possibilities. It was an immediate and electrifying success. The chancellor went on to serve as an adviser to Nixon, Ford, and Carter before his death on a ski lift in Austria.

... or when we read a few pages later ...

The chancellor warned strongly against what he called my tendency to make a feeble presentation of self. He strongly suggested I gain weight. He wanted me to "grow out" into Hitler. ... If I could become more ugly, he seemed to be suggesting, it would help my career enormously.

"There is no Hitler building as such," Gladney laments. Lacking his own physical domain, he must fraternize with the department of "American Environments", which is his college's term for the postmodern milieu of cereal-box-readers that are the grist of so much academic parody. He mentors a younger professor who wants to follow his footsteps and create a Department of Elvis Studies. A few chapters in, Gladney reveals that he, the world's expert on Hitler, never bothered to learn German. Somehow, he must learn it now -- fast, fluently, and in total secrecy -- because he's committed to hosting an International Hitler Conference the following year. ("Actual Germans would be in attendance.")

Surely, finding all this in the first 30 pages, we can assume we are on the safe ground of academic satire, the well-trodden turf (overwatered, often reseeded, loudly and fragrantly mowed) of countless books on the absurdity of academic life. But no.

Jack Gladney also has a large "postnuclear" family, including his fourth wife and a collection of children from their previous marriages. He speaks from the heart about his love for this patchwork brood. He admires his wife's volunteer spirit as she teaches posture to old people. He proudly describes each child with clear, bright lines:

... I slept, to be awakened by the smell of burning toast. That would be Steffie. She burns toast often, at any hour, intentionally. She loves the smell, she is addicted; it is her treasured scent. ... She has evolved orders of preference. Burnt rye, burnt white, so on.

Above all, though, he dreads, he's not sure what. He and his wife occasionally muse together about who will die first. ("The question comes up from time to time, like where are the car keys.") He consults all the oracles that Americans have been taught to trust -- science, government, advertising, the family, and of course, one of the novel's most endearing characters, the television. Finding no answers, he must content himself with simply describing the absurdities that define daily life for his family, his career, his country -- absurdities any American will recognize.

An early chapter opens with a comment that speaks for the book: "Let us enjoy these aimless days while we can, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration." And so he does. A searing joy runs through many scenes, often arising from the simple conjunction of meaningless events, the disjointed dialogue of a family having three conversations at once, with input from the television. Their town's giant supermarket is a temple of abundance and life to which we keep returning:

Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were backed with mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in upper rows. A voice on the loudspeaker said: "Kleenex Softique, your truck's blocking the entrance." ... Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished, bright. People tore filmy bags off racks and tried to figure out which end opened. I realized the place was awash in noise. 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.

Everyday life, especially its nonsequiturs, its safe surprises, is the stuff of joy. Gladney recounts this joy with an exaggerated brightness, because its inverse, dread, is always there, "just outside the range of human apprehension." The simutaneity of joy and dread is part of this book's magic -- it's ability to be hilarious, satirical, and frightening all at once.

So while Jack Gladney is, on the surface, the stuff of satire, he is also much more. Dropping his son off at school, he muses:

I watched him walk through the downpour to the school entrance. He moved with deliberate slowness, taking off his camouflage cap ten yards from the doorway. At such moments I find I love him with an animal desperation, a need to take him under my coat and crush him to my chest, keep in there, protect him. ...

What genre are we in here? I have no idea. Even this paragraph returns to satire by the end. ("He works well into the night, plotting chess moves in a game he plays by mail with a convicted killer in the penitentiary.") Still, there's no mistaking the authenticity of feeling that drives Gladney even in his most laughable moments, and that carry this novel beyond all boundaries of genre.

White Noise contains family drama, broad comedy, wisps of whodunit, and cultural commentary that often departs from fiction altogether. ("We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.") The fragments of genre also coalesce into a plot, in three large movements, which I've declined to reveal by quoting only from the first 30 pages. But trust me, dear reader, White Noise keeps up the promise of its title to the end. And whatever happens, the supermarket's mountains of produce will always give off that otherworldly gleam, "sprayed, burnished, bright."

Recommended: Yes