“White Noise”
by Emma Cline
from the June 8 & 15, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
The longest story in this year’s Summer Fiction issue is Emma Cline’s “White Noise,” a fictional #MeToo story with a POV character named Harvey. Cleary, this is Harvey Weinstein, and it appears Cline puts us in his head as he awaits his trial verdict. In the accompanying New Yorker interview Willing Davidson starts where most of us would start: “why extend fictional empathy to real-world predators?” I think her answer is fascinating and astute: “It’s much more — frightening? disturbing? — to me that characters like the fictional Harvey might experience themselves as victims, pitiable and under attack, or that we can see elements of ourselves in this fictional Harvey.”
As for the title, of course most of us will immediately think of Don DeLillo’s famous book. From the interview I see that indeed White Noise comes up, and perhaps not just as a reference point.
I’m very curious how this story will land. It is twice the length of a typical contemporary New Yorker story, but I think it will be read even more than the new Hemingway and Murakami sequel that this same issue provides. It is apparently adapted from a novella, so I’m curious to see when that appears. It does not look like it will feature in her forthcoming book of stories, Daddy, though from that collection’s description it looks like “White Noise” would fit there.
I still know Cline’s work primarily through reputation. I have not read her debut, The Girls, which took its inspiration from the girls at the Manson Family ranch in 1969. She seems to go for it. I’m anxious to read this and to read your thoughts. Please comment below.
I haven’t read this yet but her appropriating the title of a fine Don DeLillo book creates high expectations as far as I am concerned.
I struggled to find the point of this story. The portrayal of Harvey’s understanding of his own victimhood is too uncomplicated, too trite and obvious to compel or unsettle. And I cringed every time the story mentioned DeLillo. Perhaps a more generous reader could provide a better analysis.
A problem with writing about Harvey Weinstein is that if anyone writes anything about him they could be accused of celebrating male masculine toxicity. But if it is written from jaded perspective, he and his behavior is being condemned. Cline acknowledges this in how nobody wants to talks to him or just says what minimally could get them through an uncomfortable moment. Readers often don’t like fiction with nonfiction elements stirred in. It’s like a new journalism piece that isn’t quite nonfiction but isn’t quite fiction either. But it does almost seem like it could run as a feature story in the New York Times Magazine on a Sunday. Agree that the subject is banal and Weinstein’s viewpoint on himself even in third person is delusory because the man has to work so hard to justify the unjustifiable. Crime is boring but Truman Capote in his novel In Cold Blood, brings the murderers under the microscope. So the strength of this piece is in that sort of precision. Weinstein cannot find his own mantra in India or makes noise when it is told to him. A mantra is like truth that one can deny or not hear if it is too uncomfortable. This is echoed in the night at the end of the story having no stars. Weinstein’s future is empty and his work with film has been ripped of any value or significance. So he tries to latch on to Don DeLillo to grasp at having achieved some shred of cultural validity or meaning. The man’s ability to perceive is undermined by his mistaking the first line of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Readers often value invention and creative imagination about the unknown or the more complex or things or people who are not easily understood. When a writer is really inventive about imagining the mindset of a trashy or rubbish like person, it may be very precise in tone, details and possible physical action and verbal dialogue. And brilliant in that way. But it might be less popular with readers because so many of the details of Harvey Weinstein’s actual reality have been flooded to use over various media that the imaginary details are not given too much attention because they seem too close to protagonist’s actual life.
Well, I spent a couple of hours today reading this and didn’t walk away with much. It could be me, of course, so I welcome comments from those who found more to this story.
Honestly, I found Cline’s interview more insightful since she boiled down what she was doing to a few sentences. Drawn out here, Harvey’s certainty he is getting off — because this is America — is not as interesting. Larry says it well: this could be a feature and be more interesting; I don’t see what fictionalizing this has added.
There is the DeLillo stuff, of course. Or, the Don DeLillo stuff (since neither Harvey nor our narrator seems to want to call him anything but his full name, which I understand — it makes him a figure and not someone who we can believe would actually collaborate with Weinstein). I find myself more in line with Mac above, kind of wincing each time DeLillo’s work is brought up. Naturally Harvey’s understanding of DeLillo’s work is going to be presented as superficial (he doesn’t even know he’s mistaking White Noise for Gravity’s Rainbow until an attorney points it out, and he then explains it as both being essentially the same thing), but I felt the story didn’t do much with DeLillo’s work either. It was just, to me, Harvey’s pie-in-the-sky next project, his delusion of grandeur compounded by his lack of comprehension for the situation he is really in.
I felt let down, I guess. And maybe it’s for what William brings up above: Cline sets my expectations through the roof by referencing DeLillo so explicitly in the title, and I can’t say it connected with me.
I do hope someone will come along who felt differently. I’d love to see more here.
Now that I’ve read it, I feel let down. Or I would, if I had any expectations. I’m certainly not going to show anyone something that they missed. Larry made some good points. Basically, how can you make fiction out of something or someone so obvious or so familiar? Cline doesn’t bring anything new or creative to the profile of this man. I just finished reading “The Resisters”, by Gish Jen. A fine novel. One reviewer rightly said it could either be prophecy or present-day journalism. Cline’s story could be journalism, as a couple of people noted. But nothing more. And not very insightful journalism, at that. Just another in the string of “Men are bad” stories that the NYer is publishing these days.
I certainly was engaged and entertainined by this but I don’t feel it illuminates anything new about Weinstein. Why would a writer want to spend so much time inside his head especially when what she comes up with is kind of what you’d expect. I did like the scene on the plane back from India where he asks a subordinate to tell her what mantra she got and how he knows he’ll triumph but that the joy is in the way he’ll triumph, in how the victim will or won’t demur or hesitate. He’s like a conoisseur of harassment, savoring the nuances of his victimization. That was my favorite, and perhaps the most damning, part of it.
“A connoisseur of harassment, savoring the nuances of his victimization” — well said, Ken. Nice phrases.
I did read this story with some interest. The concept of it. The sliding into the consciousness of Harvey. In the wake of events since May 25 I found myself wondering what’s in the mind now of Officer Chauvin? Think about it. For those four officers and George Floyd the day starts innocently enough, not unlike any other. Then in a matter of less than nine minutes it all changes, not just for those men but conceivably for all of us. as we watch and live events subsequent in real time occurring all over the world. Society brought to an inflection point.
What’s in the mind of the Officer Chauvin? How desperately might he want to live those minutes differently? Can those feelings even be adequately articulated?
Ambitious thoughts, Dennis. Can’t imagine.
I’m much more enthusiastic about this story than the consensus. In a typical year, this would probably be among my top three or four New Yorker stories. What the author has done is to provide a credible and imaginative portrait of the Weinstein events from the perpetrator’s standpoint. That is a fine achievement in itself. The detractions read to me a bit like “I don’t really get the point of this restaurant. All they do is provide food which tastes really good, a welcoming atmosphere and efficient service. I was disappointed that the restaurant experience didn’t provide more and I’d like to hear more from other diners who did enjoy it.”
Am I the only woman commenting here? I loved the story. I wasn’t forewarned so the increasing horror I felt as I realized this was Weinstein propelled me through, as did the curiosity as to why a woman would want to write this and how surprisingly well I think she got into his head (unless the men here disagree!). I didn’t read her interview but was curious to hear what this group thought…disappointed nobody else liked it. On to see what you thought of the Murakami story, which I’m guessing will generate the opposite reaction….from me, too!
Yes, Pauline. The gathering intensity, driven by his loneliness, possibly his perverse raison d’etre for sexual violence, is drawn to a visceral pathetic cringe of an ending. The afterglow of this story was, for me, a 6 hour deep reflection in stillness. My most trivial revelation during that reverie was how I could now understand that Ms.Cline wasn’t on Facebook, the perfect antidote to thoughtfulness. After 6 hours, I returned to uncovering my “like”‘s.
The latest London Review of Books refers to this story: “Last spring, the New Yorker ran a story called ‘White Noise’ by Emma Cline, in which Harvey Weinstein is staying at a friend’s house in Connecticut. It is the day before his trial and he pads into the garden, where he sees the man next door, dressed in old-fashioned pyjamas, picking up his newspaper. He is Don DeLillo. The men exchange pleasantries and Cline has her fictional Weinstein contemplate the necessity of producing a film of ‘the unfilmable book’ White Noise, which will surely prove to be his great comeback. ‘Now is the PERFECT TIME to do this MOVIE,’ he types into his phone: ‘we as a nation are hungry 4 meaning.’ He later imagines the other neighbours, the ‘sleeping citizens, dreaming in their beds, unaware of Harvey and Don DeLillo vibrating on a higher frequency’.” For the whole piece, see https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n23/andrew-o-hagan/coughing-out-slogans.