Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club.

I'm Megan O'Rourke, a culture critic for Slate.

Joining me today are Troy Patterson, Slate's wonderful TV critic.

Hello.

And Stephen Metcalf, dilettante columnist and the ringleader of the wonderful Culture Gab Fest.

Welcome, Steve. So Troy's wonderful, and the Culture Gab Fest is wonderful. And the wonderful Steve McCath. I knew I was going to screw that. Here I've written, and the wonderful. But then I had to fill it in, and I got confused. Did you underline it twice? Thank you, Megan. It was a pleasure to be here. I'm really glad to have both of you here today to discuss Don DeLillow's White Noise,

which is both a loved and hated novel, one of the most loved and most hated novels of the past 25 years.

We're actually discussing it because it was first published 25 years ago,

and there's a new addition to honor the anniversary,

published at the same time as his new novel, Point Omega, which has been much anticipated.

And we may touch a little bit on Point Omega as well.

So I'm going to turn it over to you guys in one sec, but I thought I would just do a quick refresher for our audience members, our listeners, who haven't read the novel a long time. White Noise is

the story of, it follows a year in the life of Jack Gladney, who is the professor of Hitler

Studies at a kind of bucolic college known as the College on the Hill. And Hitler Studies is a field

that he has invented. He's married currently to a woman named Babette, but he's had four previous marriages. And he and Babette live in a kind of home filled with many children, children of different parentage. And it's a kind of the resolutely non-nuclear American family. And both Jack and Babette suffer from a crippling fear of death, which

becomes one of the great subjects of the novel. And the book is divided in three sections.

The section I remembered most clearly from the first time I'd read it was the section about

the airborne toxic event, and we'll get to that. But the third section is also about these pills called Dylar, which are psychopharmaceutical

pills that rid you of a fear of death.

And we will talk about all this and more.

I would also say, Megan, that from beginning to end, the book is about consumerism.

Absolutely.

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