Don DeLillo must be the best-known least-known writer in America. He's the David Lynch of fiction, fascinated with ooze and isolation and fibrous growth, and he has a brain like a data bank. (An encounter in his 1973 novel, Great Jones Street, between the hero and a moist, baby-headed specter might have inspired Lynch's film Eraserhead.) He explores theaters of conflict, from football (End Zone) to Wall

Street (Players) to astrophysics (Ratner's Star), and his casualty reports are wry, vivid, exact. He's in a broadcast booth high above the action, peering through binoculars and counting every pore. Yet despite his computer mind and telescopic vision, DeLillo doesn't exist as a personality on the literary scene. He doesn't have Updike's wiseelf twinkle, Bellow's pinstripe savvy, Mailer's bull-goring belligerence; he doesn't even generate a misterioso mystique, like Salinger or Pynchon. He's so self-effacing he's imageless.

Fame isn't likely to carve out a face for DeLillo on Mount Rushmore with the publication of his new novel, White Noise (Viking), for it's not a book that swells with ego and self-advertisement—its brilliance is dark and sheathed. And probing. In White Noise, Don DeLillo takes a Geiger-counter reading of the American family, and comes up with ominous clicks.

After the globe-hopping intrigue of his previous novel, The Names, DeLillo has returned to small-town U.S.A., where the living is uneasy. Carcinogens teem inside the brightly labeled cans at the supermarket, and the air has a toxic tinge. Where such writers as Ann Beattie and Bobbie Ann Mason use brand names to give their fiction a homey, pop immediacy, DeLillo uses them distancingly to instill a dreamy, poetic dread. "The emptiness, the sense of cosmic darkness. MasterCard, Visa, American Express." It isn't all gloom and doom, however. Occasionally, he employs synthetics in the mandarin manner of Wallace Stevens, to get a comic rise out of us. "I was barefoot and robeless and felt a chill pass through the Hong Kong polyester of my pajamas." The man in the polyester pajamas is the book's narrator, Jack Gladney, who teaches a course in advanced Nazism at a small liberal-arts college where Hitler is studied as a demigod of charisma. DeLillo wittily nails those academics who revel in kitsch, "an Aristotelianism of bubble gum wrappers and detergent jingles." The instructors, he notes, are an argumentative, unkempt lot. "Together they look like teamster officials assembled to identify the body of a mutilated colleague."

But, heaven be thanked, White Noise isn't a typical campus novel about faculty high jinks and coeds bursting out of their sweaters. Using Gladney's family as a test unit, DeLillo studies the "colloquial density" of life under one crowded roof—"Heat, noise, lights, looks, words, gestures, personalities, appliances"—and how that colloquial density is shot through with media ions of micro-significance. That may sound awfully morbid and clinical, but the book's stately manner softens the reader up for the kill. Apprehension drizzles like acid rain and then, suddenly, spectacularly, DeLillo unleashes a thunderhead.

On the horizon one morning a puff of chemical leakage appears, at first described by the authorities as "a feathery plume" (picturesque, harmless), then as "a black billowing cloud" (massy, threatening), then as an "airborne toxic event" (run for your station wagons!). When the Gladneys pack into the car and join in the evacuation, it's as if they were participating in a parody of a family outing, complete with bickering and bladder complaints. But the stalled, honking procession begins to remind you of Godard's apocalyptic traffic jam in Weekend, and then it appears, like a vision out of Moby-Dick.

Through the stark trees we saw it, the immense toxic cloud, lighted now by eighteen choppers—immense almost beyond comprehension, beyond legend and rumor, a roiling bloated slug-shaped mass. It seemed to be generating its own inner storms. There were cracklings and sputterings, flashes of light, long looping streaks of chemical flame. The car horns blared and moaned. The helicopters throbbed like giant appliances. We sat in the car, in the snowy woods, saying nothing.

We have moved from Melville's whiteness of the whale to the blackness of the slug. And what does this slug signify? "In its tremendous size, its dark and bulky menace, its escorting aircraft, the cloud resembled a national promotion for death, a multimillion-dollar campaign backed by radio spots, heavy print and billboard, TV saturation." Death—the ultimate production. Directed by Steven Spielberg.

Like a number of DeLillo's novels, White Noise is far better in buildup than in consummation—his endings tend to taper off to a fatalistic shrug. And he's too perversely fond of setting up confrontations in which characters grapple one another in an absurdist death grip, like circus clowns battling over an abyss. (In this novel, Gladney perforates the midsection of a pill-gobbling scientist and then drags his carcass across "blood-dappled tile.") I also wish DeLillo had been able to keep his wonderful original title for this book, Panasonic. But with its humming intelligence and nerviness, White Noise pays

dividends even in its off moments. Attila the Hun died young," DeLillo's narrator observes. "He was the King of the Huns, the Invader of Europe, the Scourge of God. I want to believe he lay in his tent, wrapped in animal skins, as in some internationally financed movie epic, and said brave cruel things." Don DeLillo may not wear animal skins or Hong Kong polyester, but he does say brave cruel things, in novel after novel. White Noise doesn't flinch. □