Underworld, a monumental chronicle of America since 1951, unfolding mostly in reverse, is DeLillo's most universally acclaimed and best-selling work so far. While most of DeLillo's works have been compact, even terse, Underworld covers a vast canvas with dozens of characters. One of its protagonists, the haunted "waste analyst" Nick Shay, recalls Gladney in his obsession with the detritus of consumer culture and his attraction to violence and the demonic. Although Underworld is at once broader and more personal than DeLillo's earlier novels-drawing for the first time upon his background as an Italian American reared in the Bronx-it expands again on the relationship between "American magic and dread," analyzing the myriad theologies through which Americans seek to reclaim transcendence in a world of fearsome technologies and fulsome messages.

White Noise thus brings together many of DeLillo's obsessions: the deleterious effects of capitalism, the power of electronic images, the tyrannical authority and dangerous byproducts of science, the unholy alliance of consumerism and violence, and the quest for sacredness in a secularized world. Like all of his fiction, it displays his virtuoso command of language and, particularly, his ventriloquistic capacity to mimic the argots of various cultural forms. In it he amplifies the noises around us and permits us to hear again how these sounds shape our own voices and beliefs.

The first critical analysis of White Noise appeared only two years after its publication, in Tom LeClair's influential book, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. LeClair places DeLillo in the canon of other American "systems novelists" (such as Thomas Pynchon), who analyze the effects of institutions on the individual. LeClair's chapter on White Noise (reprinted here on pages 387-411) presents the Gladneys' trash compactor as a self-reflexive image of both the novel itself and of postmodern America; he goes on to argue that DeLillo finds in that rubbish a source of transcendence that enables Jack to glean a more satisfactory relationship with nature, his body, and death.