“I want to immerse myself,” says one character in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, White Noise, “in American magic and dread.” Plenty of novels capture American dread, but few understand its relationship to American magic as well as White Noise. Ahead of Netflix’s adaptation of the novel, it’s worth revisiting DeLillo’s masterpiece, which remains one of our most perceptive visions of contemporary America and the desperate illusions of consumer society.

White Noise centers on Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill (a name that recalls the description of America, often used by Ronald Reagan, as “the city on the hill”). Jack and his family live a normal middle-class life — supermarket, mall, television — but in DeLillo’s hands, it is an uncanny normality. White Noise confronts the problem faced by every novelist who tries to depict the United States: the strangeness of our society defies the conventions of literary realism.

Novelists, as Philip Roth put it, have their “hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality.” DeLillo solves this problem with a kind of heightened realism: the department heads at the College-on-the-Hill wear short-sleeved academic gowns; the skies fill with unusually brilliant sunsets that, it is rumored, are the product of industrial waste in the air; all the characters speak with the fluency and timing of a sitcom. These distortions magnify real features of our world: fussy professional hierarchies, alienation from the natural world, media overconsumption.