[3] In late 2022, the novel was adapted by director Noah Baumbach into a film of the same name starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig.

He has been married five times to four women and rears a number of children and stepchildren (Heinrich, Denise, Steffie, Wilder) with his current wife, Babette.

The first part of White Noise, called "Waves and Radiation," is a chronicle of contemporary family life combined with academic satire.

For instance, the mysterious deaths of men in "Mylex" (intended to suggest Mylar) suits and the ashen, shaken survivors of a plane that went into free fall anticipate the catastrophe of the book's second part.

"Waves and Radiation" also introduces Murray Jay Siskind, Jack's friend and fellow college professor, who discusses theories about death, supermarkets, media, "psychic data", and other facets of contemporary American culture.

In the second part of the novel, "The Airborne Toxic Event," a chemical spill from a rail car releases a black noxious cloud over Jack's home region, prompting an evacuation.

The novel becomes a meditation on modern society's fear of death and its obsession with chemical cures as Jack seeks to obtain his own black-market supply of Dylar.

However, Dylar does not work for Babette, and it has many possible side effects, including losing the ability to "distinguish words from things, so that if someone said 'speeding bullet,' I would fall to the floor and take cover.

After a black comedy scene of Jack driving and rehearsing, in his head, several ways in which their encounter might proceed, he successfully locates and shoots Willie, who at the time is in a delirious state caused by his own Dylar addiction.

Suddenly realizing the needless loss of life, Jack carries Willie to a hospital run by German nuns who do not believe in God or an afterlife.

[5] The exact geographical setting of White Noise is unidentified, but elements of the novel evoke the Midwestern United States, especially the Rust Belt and Upper Midwest.

Wilder is never quoted for dialogue in the novel (however, at one point, it is said that he asked for a glass of milk) and periodically Jack worries about the boy's slow linguistic development.

He teaches a course on the cinema of car crashes, watches TV obsessively, and cheerfully theorizes about many subjects, including media saturation, mindfulness, and the meaning of supermarkets.

White Noise explores several themes that emerged during the mid-to-late twentieth century, e.g., rampant consumerism, media saturation, novelty academic intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and reintegration of the family, human-made disasters, and the potentially regenerative nature of violence.

Critic Karen Weekes notes that the professors at University-on-the-Hill "fail to inspire respect" from their students and that "the university itself is 'trivialized by the nostalgic study of popular and youth culture'"[8] by offering classes on Adolf Hitler, Elvis Presley, and cinematic car crashes.

Critic Stephen Schryer goes on to note the satirical way that characters in White Noise "lay claim to specialized knowledge that can be transmitted to others, regardless of their educational accomplishments or actual income".

"[10] Critic David Alworth suggests that characters deal with unknowns like death via the "pseudo-professional"; they respond by pretending that they are educated to understand it.

"[12] Alexander Davis has similarly made the argument that White Noise reflects humanity's changed relationship to nature as a result of rampant consumerism.

"[4] Postmodern critic Karen Weekes expands on this idea and argues that Americans "consume and die";[15] even though Jack tries to avoid death through shopping, he can't.

"[16] Additionally, critic Ruzbeh Babaee argues that in the novel, "There is a belief in the produced through media advertising, that one can shop his/her way out of any personal trauma.

Most critics agree that White Noise functions as a cautionary tale about high-tech America by focusing on the effects of technology on social relations.

"[19] He points to chapter 6 of the novel, explaining, "Heinrich refuses to trust his senses in observing the weather and chooses to believe the radio instead.

[24] This is illustrated, in the eyes of Haidar Eid of Rand Afrikaans University, by much of the imagery used to convey the incomprehensible reality of the Toxic Cloud and is explicitly thematized through Jack's conversation with the intake clerk from SIMUVAC which concludes Part 2 of the novel.

[25] Here Jack is told that even though the evacuation taking place is real, the SIMUVAC team is treating it "as a model" to be used to perfect the protocol they will use in future disaster simulations.

"[26] Such a substitution of the sign for the reality is what Baudrillard calls a simulacrum, and in White Noise this is emblematically represented by "the most photographed barn in America"[25] which, according to Peter Knight, "has perhaps become the 'Most Discussed Scene in Postmodern Fiction'.

"[28] Because as Murray explains "we've read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures," the barn is a cultural reality which has what Delillo calls an "aura".

According to Frank Lentricchia, this loss of the referent, the dissolving of the object into its representations, lends the passage the status of a "primal scene", but one which is for Murray an occasion for celebration because it is a "technological transcendence"[28] and "We're part of the aura.

[32] DeLillo interprets religion in White Noise unconventionally, most notably drawing comparisons between Jack's local supermarket and a religious institution on several occasions.

Critic Karen Weekes argues that religion in White Noise has "lost its quality" and that it is a "devaluation" of traditional belief in a superhuman power.

[8] According to critic Tim Engles, DeLillo portrays protagonist Jack Gladney as "formulating his own prayers and seeking no solace from higher authority".