Why White Noise was on my short list for worst books read for English class, and why it’s redeemed itself (kinda)

Through the first part of the satirical novel, I was just about ready to label White noise as the worst book I read during all of high school. That is with other hard-hitters such as Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice (great movie, dull read) to contend with. Here’s why:

There is simply little structure, or plot. I will be the first person to say that I need a novel to have at least some degree of structure, or some reason for me to read it. The book begins in media res, and as the reader I had no clue who many of the characters are and more importantly, I had no idea what they were all doing. There is no conflict, no reason for me to care a single iota about anybody in the story. Perhaps the only entertaining chapter of the first part was chapter 8, in which Jack begins taking lessons in order to learn how to speak German, despite his being fluent in the written language. But this hilarious chapter was interspersed with many seemingly meaningless ones, such as the entire chapter devoted to recounting the day his child wouldn’t stop crying. Why was this chapter included? Nobody knows. Once the plot picked up, I became slightly intrigued, with the explosion, and the toxic cloud that set Jack’s date of death. However, an action-heavy plot was never the point of the novel, so it bounced between plot and ther random chapters. 

Honestly, by the end I didn’t know mostly what was going on. Everything about the novel just seemed irrational (as I’m sure was the point). I was almost hoping that Jack would get so overwhelmed by his fear of death that he would resort to killing himself with the gun he got from Vernon. It would have been the ultimate irony: bringing about what he fears the most, while also dying in the same way as Hitler. It also makes no sense, but neither did the rest of the book, so why not?