White Noise: Life in a Postmodern World

Critics often describe author Don DeLillo as prescient. His novels from the 1970s and 1980s—the most famous one being White Noise—explore themes that feel highly contemporary: paranoia and technology, hyper-consumerism, and the impact of mass media on the American psyche. But DeLillo wouldn’t describe himself as a prophet of twenty-first-century life. “I don’t think anyone is prescient,” he said to Entertainment Weekly in a (rare) interview from 2003. “What artists sometimes do is see things a little sooner than other people see them, that’s all.” DeLillo doesn’t see the future in his fiction. He illuminates the invisible forces of late capitalism that have been shaping American culture for decades.