White Noise begins in the town of Blacksmith. Jack spends much time at his job at the college, the College-On-The-Hill. Blacksmith is a college town. The novel carries on about pollution issues regarding the weather. Toward the end of the book, the family tends to be on the move from different places and travels.[5]
The exact geographical setting of White Noise is unidentified, but elements of the novel evoke the Midwestern United States, especially the Rust Belt and Upper Midwest. The fictional Iron City shares its name with the Pittsburgh beer company of the same name. Critic John Pistelli wrote that a Midwestern setting was "thematically appropriate to the novel's concern with the vanishing of labor and laboring know-how."[6]
