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Set at a bucolic eastern college, White Noise follows a year in the life of Jack Gladney, a professor who has made his name by pioneering the field of Hitler Studies (though he doesn't speak German). We meet his large, extended family: he's been married several times and has a brood of children and step-children with his wife, Babette. In its first half, White Noise is a chronicle of absurdist family life combined with academic satire.

In the second half, a chemical spill wafts an Airborne Toxic Event over the city, causing an evacuation. Frightened by his exposure to the Airborne Toxic Event, Gladney is forced to confront his mortality. Soon the novel becomes a meditation on modern society's fear of death and our obsession with chemical cures as Gladney searches out a black market drug called Dylar.

White Noise's importance to literature lies in its exploration of all the themes that have emerged of the past thirty years: rampant consumerism, media saturation, novelty intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and re-integration of the family, and the promise of rebirth through violence.