Since Americana (1971), Don DeLillo has converted our national confusions into witty, imaginative fiction. End Zone, a resourceful handling of football and nuclear war, brought him wide and serious attention. But without bestseller sales figures or a dependable cult following, he has become something of a reviewer's writer, a provider of topical allegories ripe for explanation and interpretation. Great Jones Street confronted the void of celebrity, and Ratner's Star measured the gap between science and humanity. There were terrorists in Players, spies and pornography in Running Dog and cult killers in The Names.
White Noise features a cloud of toxic industrial...