![]() ![]() And yet I avoided White Noise with special stubbornness. The only person this is hurting is myself. I have still never cracked The Little Prince, or On the Road, or Slaughterhouse-Five. It never showed up on a high-school or college reading list, for one thing, but more pertinently I have an embarrassing and completely unproductive resistance to reading what people tell me I should read. I have no good reason for how or why I evaded this book for so long. Read: The author of White Noise reviews Taylor Swift’s white noise Any writer with an interest in probing “American magic and dread”-to borrow a phrase from the novel-is probably in conversation with DeLillo, whether or not she knows it. Sometimes my mother will read something I’ve written and say, a little balefully, “You should really be reading White Noise,” suggesting that this gap in my education, specifically, is egregious and foolish. I seem to be the only college-educated person left in America who hasn’t read Don DeLillo. She still does this a few times a year, but for a while she was finding White Noise echoes at least once a week. “This is just like White Noise !” she would say, listening to the radio or sitting at the dinner table. She read it for a class after going back to graduate school to study literature when I was in my late teens, got excited about the book, and later taught it to her own students. This is something my mother has been saying to me for about 15 years. “That’s just like White Noise,” she said. I mentioned this the next day to my mother when we spoke on the phone: the silent, dark plane all the people quietly watching, hour after hour. By the time we landed, the decision had been made. Strapped in shoulder to shoulder in a metal tube hurtling 35,000 feet over the breadth of America, everyone watched the country’s electorate reveal itself on our own screens. and midnight eastern on November 8, 2016, 180 televisions shone their bluish light on 180 faces arranged in rows of three, facing forward. ![]() The flight from JFK to SFO is about six and a half hours, depending on the wind, so between the hours of 7 p.m. Pennsylvania and Ohio, Iowa and Nebraska, passed silently beneath us as the returns came in. View MoreĪs the sunset outpaced the plane and the dark rose outside our windows, I saw that everyone else had their television turned to the news, too. ![]() Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. ![]()
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