An American college professor of self-described 'Hitler studies', his wife Babette, and his kids and stepkids try to keep abreast of a society with too much meaning and none at all: academia specialized into impotence, endlessly multiplying product lines, mass tourism mediated by mass transit and media, and the emptiness of professionalized process. Don DeLillo's White Noise is a book about the search for genuine human elements in such paranoiac conditions, and the consequences of failing to do so- or at least of doing so in the wrong places. It's so intensely affecting that I've only read it straight through once but remember it more vividly than I do most books. One of my favorite books ever.