I think - perhaps - one reason why I didn't fall in love with White Noise is that I'm not particularly afraid of death. Are you? My own, I mean; not my family's or my friends'. I guess I'm afraid of a messy death, but that's more to do with being a complete wimp about pain more than death itself. Maybe it's cos I haven't come very close to death, or been in personal contact with it. I'd never take my own life. But if death should come - not by my own hand, and swiftly, and painlessly - I'm not sure it'd be such a bad thing? I don't have a deathwish. But complete nothingness - which is what I take death to be, rather than some fiery hell - an absolute not-being - I think it might come as relief rather than regret. A way of not having to deal with the messiness of life anymore - a way that takes the messiness out of your hands, a way that's entirely beyond your control. Not that life is not worth living. Not that life isn't good right now. But just that - if I were told I should die tomorrow - I'd be awfully sorry to disappoint and/or upset people - but for myself - it might not be entirely unwelcome. Which is why, I guess, I can't really relate to the crippling fear that the characters in White Noise have about death. Or perhaps this fear becomes more real towards middle age, when death becomes an intrusive reality rather than a misty far-off destiny?

More on White Noise itself. It's been a long time since I've read a novel...well perhaps not that long. I just read Lolita and that one I loved - it's a novel that's as much (as Nabokov himself says) about the writer's romance with the English language as about Humbert's romance with Dolores/Lolita. The language is hot and heavy with longing and desire and despair. But never so you entirely drown in it. And never as an indulgence, the way Rushdie's language sometimes is (more and more so, I suspect) - there's a delight in the language, yes; a fierce delight, despite the unhappiness - but it's never pure indulgence. I really should read Don Delillo again and do his book justice but his language is not as clear and swift and commanding - it's not just because of the subject-matter, I don't think - and it's not about lyricism or pretty words. Some sentences are too explicitly fraught with significance. Occasionally - more in the beginning than towards the end - the story stumbles over its own words. You can't always forget that you're reading a novel - something someone laboured over - and I use laboured advisedly. Of course, the heavy-handedness works in that the characters are themselves very heavy-handed, and take themselves far too seriously - it must be possible to write a serious work without taking your own work too seriously - but I think sometimes Delillo takes the pronouncements of his characters too seriously. These days I've been reading Thurber, and perhaps that has affected how I read other books - I think good prose is clear, limpid, lucid. (Is limpid the word I want?) Delillo's White Noise is clearly carefully and cleverly written - that is beyond question - but his language doesn't move me.