20 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present

Tom LeClair, “Closing the Loop: White Noise,” in his In the Loop: Don DeLillo
and the Systems Novel (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987),
207–236.
Interesting analysis of the novel’s structures and response to contemporary struc-
tures and systems, arguing for its emotional resonance.

Frank Lentricchia, Introducing Don DeLillo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1991).
Includes twelve articles, one of which is the famous Rolling Stone essay coauthored
with Anthony DeCurtis. The critical essays tend to focus on themes and philoso-
phies rather than on one individual novel, so White Noise is discussed in several.

Lentricchia, ed., New Essays on White Noise (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991).
In addition to an overview of the novel’s critical reception by Lentricchia, includes
four essays covering such topics as family, perceptions of Adolf Hitler in the
twentieth century, technology, and postmodern America.

Jeffrey MacIntyre, “Don DeLillo,” Salon .com (23 October 2001) http://www.
salon.com/people/bc/2001/10/23/delillo/index1.html [accessed 23 Novem-
ber 2009].
Overview of DeLillo’s career with an emphasis on his importance as a cultural
critic and his prescience in identifying the developing preoccupations of his age.

Leonard Orr, White Noise: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Continuum, 2003).
Brief but helpful analysis and close reading of the novel.

Karen Weekes, “Consuming and Dying: Meaning and the Marketplace in
DeLillo’s White Noise,” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, 18 (October
2007): 285–302.
Discusses the role of consumerism in the novel, drawing on the use of the term
“white noise” in the discipline of economics.

—John Orr and Kathryn West

h

Joan Didion, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live:

Collected Nonfiction

(New York: Knopf, 2006)

“I am so physically small,” Joan Didion writes, “so temperamentally unobtrusive,
and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs
counter to their best interests.” So Didion explains her “only advantage as a
reporter” with a directness of voice that has become her trademark. She has won
acclaim for her Hollywood screenplays and novels, which include Run River
(1963), Play It as It Lays (1970), A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy