Try as one might, it is difficult to avoid Don DeLillo forever. He may not be a bestseller, but his books seem—at times anyway—to be ubiquitous. His new novel, White Noise,[1] is his eighth, and it has all but one of its predecessors to keep it company on bookstore shelves. For DeLillo has, somehow, managed to become a member of that elite circle of writers whose books are kept in print. It’s strange: there are titles by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner that are not easy to locate even at reputable literary bookstores; but at many such establishments one can, without any trouble, find the novels of DeLillo in attractive, attention-getting Vintage paperback editions, their uniform front covers decorated with striking, surrealistic, black-and-white photographs, their back covers (and front matter) crammed with critical testimony that this fellow is, no question about it, the novelist of our times. “He has a chillingly persuasive view,” writes Bruce Allen, “of who we are in the Twentieth Century and where we might be going.” He is a master of “modern alienation and violence” (The Washington Post); he, “more than any other novelist to emerge in this decade [the Seventies], . . . knows the spoiled goods of America” (Thomas LeClair in The New Republic); he is in touch with “the sinister ambiguities, the floating ugliness of America’s recent history” (John Updike); he meditates “on the excesses of contemporary thought” (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt); he reflects “our era’s nightmares and hallucinations” (Abe