Should Don DeLillo win a Nobel Prize?

Over the past few years there have been some murmurs hinting or hoping that Don DeLillo will be or should be the next U.S. writer to win a Nobel Prize for literature - perhaps as a make-up for bypassing both Updike and Roth! DD is +80 years old, so his time may be not that long. My guess is that Louise Erdrich will be the next from the U.S. - you heard it here first - but I did want to check on DD's status, so as part of my (re)reading stay-at-home project I'm re-reading his 1985 novel, White Noise, pretty much his break-through work; it received strong reviews, won a couple of prizes, and moved DD to or near to the epicenter of contemporary American writing. How's it hold up? In some ways, pretty well. I'm only about 1/3 through reading the novel, but from the start today's readers will note DD's prescience in anticipating a time of climate change and environmental disasters. The firs section of then novel focuses on a college professor, Jack (the narrator) and his blended family (4 kids by two different marriages; both he and his wife, Babette, leave a couple of marriages behind them - details left intentionally vague), and though the outer circumstances of the novel are kind of mundane - lots of academic politics and cross-marital flirtation - an aura of dread permeates the novel. For example, the school the children attend has been shut down because of some detected environmental hazard, and nobody agrees on the cause or source. Likewise, an elderly couple in a nursing home disappear and are located after a few days in a shopping mall, where they have lived in terror and confusion, unobserved. Jack's children, especially his oldest, Heinrich, seem strange and disturbed. DeLillo is excellent at creating a sense of dread and impending doom. He's also great at lists (in Roth's league there) and, to some degree, at dialog: his long passages of dialog are oblique and amusing, though sometimes it's difficult to know who's saying what (he seldom of never uses the standard "said Jack/Murray/Heinrich" to guide readers). Sometimes, though, it feels as if DD is just vamping, and he has a tendency to go after easy targets: Jack is a professor of "Hitler studies" and his friend on the faculty hope to emulate Jack by creating a department of Elvis studies; ha ha, but other than a shot at an easy target - academic politics and pretensions - what's the purpose here? Who would major in Hitler, and what college would enable such a perversion? DeLillo, though, has a lot of fun spinning out these absurdities, and they're often fun to read, but I have to say he's taking his time at getting this novel into gear. We're stuck in First.