This book feels like a spiritual antecedent between Infinite Jest and The Tunnel. I may describe it as IJ-lite. There is plot, but it is incidental to the motion of the characters, their conversations, and internal motivations which is what makes it compelling. Same can be said about any book, but this does so with a je ne sais quoi Wallacean flavor which is maybe incorrect since it's a chronological precursor to Wallace's better-known works.

• Jack Gladney is a professor of Hitler studies at the University of Blacksmith. Very quickly his internal reference as well as dialog surrounding his career abbreviates the maybe-needful full qualification of "Hitler studies" to just "Hitler." He says lots of offputting shit like "I need to grow into Hitler" by which he of course means "look more academically formidable and study more" usual at the suggestion of his colleague Murray. Married 5x to four separate women
• Murray is the comic relief. A fellow professor of a bullshit department, trying to create a field of study surrounding Elvis Presley qua Jack's Hitler studies program. He loves TV, like the spectacle of death, has drank the kool-aid, and generally seems maybe more outwardly-well-adjusted than Jack...
• Babette - the current wife. Between the two of them, they have seven children. Really worried about death.
• Heinrich - 14 year old son contrarian
• Denise - 11 year old daughter of Babette from a previous marriage. Suspect of her mother's pill consumption
• Steffie - 9 year old daughter of Jack's. Hypochondriac.
• Wilder - Babette's 2 year old son - only thing keeping her going. Never speaks, but
• Dana - Jack's 1st and 4th wife. Works for the CIA
• Tweedy - Jack's 2nd wife, mother of Hienrich – calls Jack "Tuck"
• Orest Mercator - Heinrich's friend who trains to sit in a cage with vipers, not afraid of death via discipline.

Part I is enjoyable in the same way that The Broom of the System was enjoyable, despite all its domesticity. There are some hiccups here and there, but its largely sustained by hilarious or profound dialogue. The black cloud only exists in the interactions, not yet made manifest until the beginning of Part II.

Off rip, DeLillo reveals his similar sardonic skepticism towards screens, media, and the mass consumption which drives both of those as exhibited by Wallace. Book was originally supposed to be called Panasonic but was asked not to:

That night, a Friday, we ordered Chinese food and watched television together, the six of us. Babette had made it a rule. She seemed to think that if kids watched television one night a week with parents or stepparents, the effect would be to de-glamorize the medium in their eyes, make it wholesome domestic sport. Its narcotic undertow and eerie diseased brain-sucking power would be gradually reduced. I felt vaguely slighted by this reasoning. The evening in fact was a subtle form of punishment for us all. Heinrich sat silent over his egg rolls. Steffie became upset every time something shameful or humiliating seemed about to happen to someone on the screen. She had a vast capacity for being embarrassed on other people's behalf. Often she would leave the room until Denise signaled to her that the scene was over. Denise used these occasions to counsel the younger girl on toughness, the need to be mean in the world, thick-skinned.

It was my own formal custom on Fridays, after an evening in front of the TV set, to read deeply in Hitler well into the night.

This narrative distaste of noise and damaging signal, the consequences of which have (had) not yet been fully comprehended is further anthropomorphized by the main plot device of the middle of the novel: the smog cloud.

Murray, during the first 10 chapters or so, spends his time riffing with Jack and trying to craft a vulnerability that women will find attractive:

Murray is able to produce a look that is sneaky and frank at the same time. It is a look that gives equal credence to disaster and lecherous success. He says that in the old days of his urban entanglements he believed there was only one way to seduce a woman, with clear and open desire. He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history- the very things, he says, that are most natural to him. Of these he has allowed only one element, vulnerability, to insert itself gradually into his program of straightforward lust. He is trying to develop a vulnerability that women will find attractive. He works at it consciously, like a man in a gym with weights and a mirror. But his efforts so far have produced only this half sneaky look, sheepish and wheedling.

We are also inculcated with several conversations between the family members as well as Jack's numerous ex-wives. Heinrich is hilariously insufferable – quintessential teenage boy who refuses connection with his father:

"He wants to know if it's raining now, at this very minute?"

"Here and now. That's right."

"Is there such a thing as now? 'Now' comes and goes as soon as you say it. How can I say it's raining now if your so-called 'now' becomes 'then' as soon as I say it?"

"You said there was no past, present, or future."

"Only in our verbs. That's the only place we find it."

"Rain is a noun. Is there rain here, in this precise locality, at whatever time within the next two minutes that you choose to respond to the question?"

"If you want to talk about this precise locality while you're in a vehicle that's obviously moving, then I think that's the trouble with this discussion."

"Just give me an answer, okay, Heinrich?"

"The best I could do is make a guess."

"Either it's raining or it isn't," I said.

"Exactly. That's my whole point. You'd be guessing. Six of one, half dozen of the other."

"But you see it's raining."

"You see the sun moving across the sky. But is the sun moving across the sky or is the earth turning?"

"I don't accept the analogy."

"You're so sure that's rain. How do you know it's not sulfuric acid from factories across the river? How do you know it's not fallout from a war in China? You want an answer here and now. Can you prove, here and now, that this stuff is rain? How do I know that what you call rain is really rain? What is rain anyway?"

"It's the stuff that falls from the sky and gets you what is called wet."

"I'm not wet. Are you wet?"

"All right," I said. "Very good.”

"No, seriously, are you wet?"

"First-rate," I told him. "A victory for uncertainty, randomness and chaos. Science's finest hour."

"Be sarcastic."

"The sophists and the hairsplitters enjoy their finest hour."

"Go ahead, be sarcastic, I don't care."

Heinrich's mother lives in an ashram now. She has taken the name Mother Devi and runs the business end of things. The ashram is located on the outskirts of the former copper-smelting town of Tubb, Montana, now called Dharamsalapur. The usual rumors abound of sexual freedom, sexual slavery, drugs, nudity, mind control, poor hygiene, tax evasion, monkey-worship, torture, prolonged and hideous death.I watched him walk through the downpour to the school entrance. He moved with deliberate slowness, taking off his camouflage cap ten yards from the doorway. At such moments I find I love him with an animal desperation, a need to take him under my coat and crush him to my chest, keep him there, protect him. He seems to bring a danger to him. It collects in the air, follows him from room to room. Babette bakes his favorite cookies. We watch him at his desk, an unpainted table covered with books and magazines. He works well into the night, plotting chess moves in a game he plays by mail with a convicted killer in the penitentiary.

Jack sports a foreign-seeming-though-not-disloyal, continual relation to all his wives:

Babette and I tell each other everything. I have told everything, such as it was at the time, to each of my wives. There is more to tell, of course, as marriages accumulate. But when I say I believe in complete disclosure I don't mean it cheaply, as anecdotal sport or shallow revelation. It is a form of self-renewal and a gesture of custodial trust. Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection. Babette and I have turned our lives for each other's thoughtful regard, turned them in the moonlight in our pale hands, spoken deep into the night about fathers and mothers, childhood, friendships, awakenings, old loves, old fears (except fear of death). No detail must be left out, not even a dog with ticks or a neighbor's boy who ate an insect on a dare. The smell of pantries, the sense of empty afternoons, the feel of things as they rained across our skin, things as facts and passions, the feel of pain, loss, disappointment, breathless delight. “In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

More on the erosion of society via commoditization of disaster for entertainment:

"Why is it, Alfonse, that decent, well-meaning and responsible people find themselves intrigued by catastrophe when they see it on television?"

I told him about the recent evening of lava, mud and raging water that the children and I had found so entertaining.

We wanted more, more.

"It's natural, it's normal," he said, with a reassuring nod. "It happens to everybody."

"Why?"

"Because we're suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information."

"It's obvious," Lasher said. A slight man with a taut face and slicked-back hair.

"The flow is constant," Alfonse said. "Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom."

Cotsakis crushed a can of Diet Pepsi and threw it at a garbage pail.

"Japan is pretty good for disaster footage," Alfonse said. "India remains largely untapped. They have tremendous potential with their famines, monsoons, religious strife, train wrecks, boat sinkings, et cetera. But their disasters tend to go unrecorded. Three lines in the newspaper. No film footage, no satellite hookup. This is why California is so important. We not only enjoy seeing them punished for their relaxed life-style and progressive social ideas but we know we're not missing anything. The cameras are right there. They're standing by. Nothing terrible escapes their scrutiny."

"You're saying it's more or less universal, to be fascinated by TV disasters."

"For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is."

"I don't know whether to feel good or bad about learning that my experience is widely shared."

"Feel bad," he said.

"It's obvious," Lasher said. "We all feel bad. But we can enjoy it on that level.”

Some glimmers of wisdom speckled into the random dialogs and monologs:

She called me Tuck, which is what her mother used to call her father. All the male Browners were called Tuck. When the line began to pale, producing a series of aesthetes and incompetents, they gave the name to any man who married into the family, within reason. I was the first of these and kept expecting to hear a note of overrefined irony in their voices when they called me by that name. I thought that when tradition becomes too flexible, irony enters the voice. Nasality, sarcasm, self-caricature and so on. They would punish me by mocking themselves. But they were sweet about it, entirely sincere, even grateful to me for allowing them to carry on.

Part II deals with the cloud, its effects on society, and the immediate effects on Jack's and his wife's respective reactions to the notion of death.

When his wife begins to show signs of exposure to the cloud, or at least what are thought to be the signs of exposure based on hearsay, Jack tries to be chill about it, leading to a fun little philosophical/psychological discussion of suggestibility playing a part in expression of symptoms of any disease.:

“Is it possible to have a false perception of an illusion? Is there a true déjà vu and a false déjà vu? I wondered whether her palms had been truly sweaty or whether she'd simply imagined a sense of wetness. And was she so open to suggestion that she would develop every symptom as it was announced?

I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters.

discussion of the benign things we all do that we would rather people not know that we do:

"Did you ever get an erection from a dental hygienist rubbing against your arm while she cleaned your teeth?""More times than I can count."

"When you bite dead skin off your thumb, do you eat it or spit it out?"

"Chew it briefly, then propel it swiftly from the end of the tongue."

"Do you ever close your eyes," Lasher said, "while you're driving on a highway?"

"I closed my eyes on 95 North for eight full seconds. Eight seconds is my personal best. I've closed my eyes for up to six seconds on winding country roads but that's only doing thirty or thirty-five. On multilane highways I usually hover at seventy before I close my eyes. You do this on straightaways. I've closed my eyes for up to five seconds on straightaways driving with other people in the car. You wait till they're drowsy is how you do it."

"An impatience began to flow from the three bodies in the rear seat. They wanted to be home, not here. They wanted to blink an eye and find themselves in their rooms, with their things, not sitting in a cramped car on this windswept concrete plain. Journeys home were always a test. I started up the car, knowing it was only a matter of seconds before the massed restlessness took on elements of threat. We could feel it coming, Babette and I. A sulky menace brewed back there. They would attack us, using the classic strategy of fighting among themselves."

Heinrich and I got in the car and went to watch. There were other men at the scene with their adolescent boys. Evidently fathers and sons seek fellowship at such events. Fires help draw them closer, provide a conversational wedge. There is equipment to appraise, the technique of firemen to discuss and criticize. The manliness of firefighting-the virility of fires, one might say-suits the kind of laconic dialogue that fathers and sons can undertake without awkwardness or embarrassment.

"Most of these fires in old buildings start in the electrical wiring," Heinrich said. "Faulty wiring. That's one phrase you can't hang around for long without hearing."

"Most people don't burn to death," I said. "They die of smoke inhalation."

"That's the other phrase," he said.Flames roared through the dormers.”

Awesome dialogue with German nun who patches him up after he attempts to kill, then save, Mr. Grey:

"Other nuns wear dresses," I said reasonably. "Here you still wear the old uniform. The habit, the veil, the clunky shoes. You must believe in tradition. The old heaven and hell, the Latin mass. The Pope is infallible, God created the world in six days. The great old beliefs. Hell is burning lakes, winged demons."

"You would come in bleeding from the street and tell me six days it took to make a universe?"

"On the seventh He rested."

"You would talk of angels? Here?"

"Of course here. Where else?"

I was frustrated and puzzled, close to shouting.

"Why not armies that would fight in the sky at the end of the world?"

"Why not? Why are you a nun anyway? Why do you have that picture on the wall?"

She drew back, her eyes filled with contemptuous pleasure.

"It is for others. Not for us."

"But that's ridiculous. What others?"

"All the others. The others who spend their lives believing that we still believe. It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely, the human race would die. This is why we are here. A tiny minority. To embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse."

"Pretend?"

"Of course pretend. Do you think we are stupid? Get out from here."

"You don't believe in heaven? A nun?"

"If you don't, why should I?"

"If you did, maybe I would."

"If I did, you would not have to."

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