meaghano:

Midway through I had dinner with Jen and she said maybe I should take a break from White Noise. She that DeLillo was surely a sweet, wise old man now but maybe when he wrote this book he was the boy we need to stay away from now. I laughed because the very reason I had waited until now to read this book was the series of boys who had recommended it to me. He is yours, let me have mine (and never the twain shall meet). It seemed like a boy book; it seemed like a book whose gimmick was to use Brand Names™ to portray some sort of modern trap from which none of us were absolved.

It is nothing like that. I started the book and every sentence was markedly beautiful. You can read this book for the plot and characters and themes and then you can also read it for the sentences.

The basic difference between a crash and a crash landing seemed to be that you could sensibly prepare for a crash landing, which is exactly what they were trying to do

Ironically (or maybe not-so-much), a boy I knew in college (/was not-so-secretly in love with) told me to check White Noise out as well.  I told him I would.  I didn’t, at least not right away, which was a bad move because reading it was nothing short of incredible.

“Children wincing in the sun, women in sun hats, men shading their eyes from the glare as if the past possessed some quality of light we no longer experience, a Sunday dazzle that caused people in their churchgoing clothes to tighten their faces and stand at an angle to the future, somewhat averted it seemed, wearing fixed and fine-drawn smiles, skeptical of something in the nature of the box camera.”