Like DeLillo's later novel, Mao II (1991), it asks, "When the old God leaves the world, what happens to all the unexpended faith?" (Mao II, 7). DeLillo has long been attracted to books that "open out onto some larger mystery" (LeClair 1982, 26); White Noise is such a book, one that alludes constantly to what lies just beyond our hearing, to the mysterious, the untellable, the numinous-to what DeLillo calls the "radiance in dailiness" (see page 330 of this volume). The novel defamiliarizes our familiar world by listening to the sounds and listing the products and places-television, supermarkets, and shopping centers, as well as "The Airport Marriott, the Downtown Travelodge, the Sheraton Inn and Conference Center" (White Noise, 15)-that channel the spiritual yearnings of contemporary Americans. In White Noise we revisit those temples where Americans seek "[p]eace of mind in a profit-oriented context" (87).

Despite its undeniable originality, White Noise also reprises the themes and strategies of DeLillo's earlier works. Like his first three novels, it features a first-person narrator who maintains an uneasy relationship with mass culture. David Bell, the protagonist of DeLillo's first novel, Americana (1971), drops out of his job at a television network to make an autobiographical film scrutinizing Americans' worship of televised and advertised images. In one scene (reprinted here on page 335), a character in Bell 's film calls television "an electronic form of packaging," a phrase that White Noise retransmits in its recurrent litanies of brand names and broadcast voices.

The glut of images and glamour of celebrity displayed in White Noise's tabloids take center stage in Great Jones Street (1973) and Mao II. Like Gladney, both Bucky Wunderlick, the earlier novel's rock-star protagonist, and Mao II's novelist Bill Gray seek what Wunderlick calls a "moral form to master commerce"-a means of discovering authenticity in a world crowded with images and commodities (Great Jones Street, 70). Like Bell, these characters withdraw into cocoons where they script private narratives or pursue semisacred quests, only to find their efforts transformed into just another spectacle or consumer item.