Taking a while to get the plot going in White Noise

At this point - finished the first (of two) parts of Don DeLillo's novel White Noise (1985) - I'm pretty much just exasperated. As noted in previous post, DD has his devotees and has been mentioned and touted as a possible Nobel Prize honoree, but I'm finding this novel, which was clearly his break-out though not his most ambitious work (that would be the very long and sometimes inscrutable Underworld) to be a puzzle. On the one hand, it's obvious in the first section that DD is an excellent satirist - who can forget his conception of a small liberal-arts college (unnamed and to me unidentifiable - DD is one of the few writers who so far as I can tell never did an academic stint) with a Department of Hitler Studies? - and some fantastic stretches of dialog; he's also a fine creator of aphorism and at times can do a terrifically powerful description of an action or event, such as the people disembarking from an airplane that lost all its power in mid-flight, people who looked so to speak into the jaws of death. All that said, no matter how appealing or unusual his writing is on any given page or in any given chapter, ultimately, what's the point? 100 pages in, I don't have any feeling for any of the characters and no plot has been set in motion; what we have is a set of self-centered eccentrics (not exactly realistic characters, to put it mildly) and a looming sense of dread; it's as if DD was vamping for cover until he could get his plot in motion in part 2 of the novel. I will read further - I remember from my previous reading of the novel some 35 years ago (gulp!) that there is a natural (of man-made) disaster at some point and the characters are forced to flee for safety and they encounter various obstacles along the way; DD was prophetic about environmental catastrophe but less so about the progress of technology; it's amusing to see in this novel the numerous swipes at families focused on the "TV set" - how quaint, and off the mark.