Modern Classics: White Noise

This is the second or third time I have read White Noise (1984) by Don Delillo. It is a dark, tremendously funny, novel about the greatest human fear: death.

Part campus novel, part thriller, part family drama, this is the story of academic Jack Gladney and his fourth wife Babette and all their children. Jack is the man who introduced Hitler Studies to North America. Both Jack and Babette are afraid of death although they try to keep it from each other. Babette has been secretly exchanging sex for a new experimental drug with Willie Mink. The name of the drug is Dylar and its purpose is to combat the fear of death. Once Jack finds out, after the whole family suvives an "airborne toxic event", he shoots him.

I have tried with other works by Delillo like Underground and Cosmopolis but have not been able to finish either. White Noise, however, is one of the modern American novels I have enjoyed the most.