The central character of White Noise is Jack Gladney, a professor of "Hitler Studies" at an elite private college (somewhat like Sewanee, in that its faculty members wear academic garb to class, but located in a more urban area), and his wife and children. Glad ney's profession offers many opportunities for satiric digs at the pretentions of contemporary academics (including a shot at a descendant of Endzone's Anatole Bloomberg, a neurotic Jewish intellectual called Murray Jay Siskind, who is a visiting professor in Jack's general area of popular culture), and provides a suitably ambivalent context in which the reader must attempt to evaluate the moral stance of the novel.

In the course of the narrative, Gladney discovers that he knows little or nothing about his nearest relatives. His wife, apparently, has become addicted to prescription drugs without his knowing it; he cannot talk at all with several of...