This will be biased.
Don Delillo's White Noise is, simply put, my favorite book. It is smart, relevant (even almost two decades after its first publication), steeped in sardonic humor, and constantly insightful. The book is structured around the "white noise" of everyday life: the hum of traffic, the chatter of radios and televisions and telephone conversations, sirens and sonic devices. There is mystery and doubt and the "magic and dread" of a perhaps too modern America.
The central character is Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies, a field of his own design, at the fictional "College-on-the-Hill". He has a strange and precariously balanced family life with his fourth wife, Babette, and his four children (all from previous marriages): Denise and Steffie, the impressionable daughters; Heinrich, a "question everything" sort of boy; and the vulnerable toddler Wilder. Jack's collegues are eccentric personalities including the supermarket-obsessed Elvis fanatic Murray and the always blushing and impossible-to-follow Winnie Richards.
White Noise takes all these elements and tosses them around for the first half of the novel, familiarizing you with the habits of the characters, their fears and desires. While reading, we witness conversations on the nature of sex, death, and Kleenex. We learn about the hidden wonders of supermarkets, about the virtues of generic foods. After a hundred pages, we are comfortable with the Gladney family: they are old friends.
And then there's the Airborne Toxic Event, the culmination of all the background noises, an unknown chemical cloud that hovers over the town, bringing out the worst paranoid sectors of the family. Sixty pages of straight narrative lead us through the event, the evacuation of the town, and set us up for the final section of the novel, one which introduces the mystery of the mysterious drug known only as "Dylar" and continues to hiss with the noises of modern life, including the newly formed "SIMUVAC" emergency preparedness drills which are based on the logic that, the less prepared a community is, the more likely disaster will strike.
There is no way I can capture the beauty and eloquence of White Noise in a simple expository. There is a murder scene that is perhaps the best committed to paper, and the last chapter of the book is a serene description of the human condition. There are wild comparisons between Elvis and Hitler, frightening glances at the inane things people do to achieve immortality, and, most importantly, very naked descriptions about what it means to have the capacity to fear one's own death.
I'll leave it to a passage from the novel:
On the way back from the airport, I got off the expressway at the river road and parked the car at the edge of the woods. I walked up a steep path. There was an old picket fence with a sign.
THE OLD BURYING GROUND
Blacksmith Village
The headstones were small, tilted, pockmarked, spotted with fungus or moss, the names and dates barely legible. The ground was hard, with patches of ice. I walked among the stones, taking off my gloves to touch the rough marble. Embedded in the dirt before one of the markers was a narrow vase containting three small American flags, the only sign that someone had preceded me to this place in this century. I was able to make out some of the names, great strong simple names, suggesting a moral rigor. I stood and listend.
I was beyond the traffic noise, the intermittent stir of factories across the river. So at least in this they'd been correct, placeing the graveyard here, a silence that had stood its ground. The air had a bite. I breathed deeply, remained in one spot, waiting to feel the peace that is supposed to descend upon the dead, waiting to see the light that hangs above the fields of the landscapist's lament.
I stood there, listening. The wind blew snow from the branches. Snow blew out of the woods in eddies and sweeping gusts. I raised my collar, put my gloves back on. When the air was still again, I walked among the stones, trying to read the names and dates, adjusting the flags to make them swing free. Then I stood and listened.
The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.
May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.