Word: gladneys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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BABETTE AND JACK GLADNEY love life, they really do. Everyday they think about living forever. But what if one of them should die before the other? That would be unendurable. So they devise a plan--sort of a mutual assured destruction--and it might have worked until an "airborne toxic event" forced them to evacuate their small college town with their family, tearing Jack away from his cherished position as chairman of the "Department of Hitler Studies" at the local university...
Witness Jack's seemingly innocent chore of taking out the Gladney garbage: Was this ours? Did it belong to us? I took the bag out to the garage and emptied it. The compressed bulk sat there like an ironic modern sculpture, massive, squat, mocking ... I picked through it item by item, mass by shapeless mass, wondering why I felt guilty, a violator of privacy, uncovering intimate and perhaps shameful secrets. Why did I feel like a household spy? Is garbage so private? Does it glow at the core with personal heat, with signs of one's deepest nature, clues...
DeLillo has a knack for faculty follies. The school is well known for its department of Hitler studies, headed by Jack ("J.A.K.") Gladney, the novel's narrator. Students are also offered courses in popular culture, seminars in car crashes and cereal-box texts, a professor named Alfonse ("Fast Food") Stompanato and a teaching staff of New York emigres, "smart, thuggish, movie- mad, trivia-crazed . . . here to decipher the natural language of the culture, to make a formal method of the shiny pleasures they'd known in their Europe- shadowed childhoods...
...Gladney's hustle works in reverse; instead of enhancing trivialities with phony significance, he reduces the century's paramount expression of evil to classroom entertainment. Getting a handle on his domestic arrangements is a little more difficult. The Gladneys are a parody of relationships resulting from multiple divorce. Stepchildren, half brothers and half sisters drift in and out of the household. One former wife is abroad with the CIA; another runs the business end of an ashram under the name Mother Devi. Talk is plentiful, but communication is illusive. "There must be something in family life that generates factual error...
...possible) of occult tabloids: "From beyond the grave, dead living legend John Wayne will communicate telepathically with President Reagan to help frame U.S. foreign policy. Mellowed by death, the strapping actor will advocate a hopeful policy of peace and love." In what may be regarded lightly as a plot, Gladney searches for the source of Dylar, an experimental drug that allegedly cures fear of death...