Affable Jack Gladney is professor of Hitler studies at a small midwestern college whose life is upended when a deadly chemical spill near his home creates what the authorities delicately term an Airborne Toxic Event. Gladney succumbs to anger and paranoia, and his wife, Babette, starts taking an experimental drug designed to do away with the fear of death. Though it's pitched at a level of absurdity slightly above that of real life, White Noise captures the quality of daily existence in media-saturated, hyper-capitalistic postmodern America so precisely, you don't know whether to laugh or whimper. —L.G.