Title: A disappointment
Review: I like Don DeLillo. "White Noise" is among my favorite books of the 1980s. But he really drops the ball here. This book reads like an unrevised first draft. The diamond-hard sentences of "White Noise" have now given way to flaccid stream-of-consciousness mumbling. The plot is similarly unfocused; I kept expecting all these threads to tie together more neatly, but they never do. And the flimsy scenario DeLillo has contrived here can hardly support all these grandiose meditations on contemporary society, which seem forced into the texture of the novel. One soon tires of lengthy scenes in which the characters dilate endlessly upon the social importance of the evening news, while saying things like "I have my own cosmology of pain." Give DeLillo credit: he has important things to say. The problem is that he's said everything here more memorably in previous books.
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