No longer comforted by hunkering in Hitler's penumbra, and bereft of strong ties to religion, community, or family, Jack becomes desperately obsessed with his mortality. The novel seems to veer into a midlife crisis tale. But Jack doesn't take up skydiving or learn to box. Instead, after learning that Babette has been involved in a secret experiment involving Dylar, a drug designed to dispel the fear of death, he schemes to get some at any cost. Jack's less attractive qualities-self-absorption, hypocrisy, rage-emerge, prompting him to devise an implausible plot that itself seems to come from a TV movie. Yet Jack's alternately ludicrous and pathetic confrontation with his nemesis neither solves his problem nor resolves the plot, which does not, after all, "move death-ward" (26). With this enigmatic, postmodernist conclusion, the novel moves beyond all the formulae it has employed.

Even those who cherish the novel's comedy cannot ignore its deeply ominous undercurrent, for White Noise is most of all a profound study of the American way of death: one of DeLillo's working titles was "The American Book of the Dead." It gains much of its remarkable resonance from its unflinching depiction of the nameless fear pervading postmodern society. Like Murray Siskind, DeLillo is particularly interested in "American magic and dread," and his novel dramatizes how our obsessions with exercise and disease, our millennialist religions, our tabloid stories of resurrection and celebrity worship, and our compulsive consumerism offer charms to counteract the terror of oblivion.

White Noise is thus also a novel about religion-or, perhaps more accurately, about belief.