Underworld
By Don DeLillo
Scribner, 827 pages, $27.50
Where does fact end and fiction begin? Novelist Don DeLillo explores this question–and a thousand others–in his utterly extraordinary new book, “Underworld,” which takes for its point of departure the last game of the National League playoffs in 1951, when a playoff meant the regular season had ended in a tie.
It was the rubber match between the soon-to-abandon-Brooklyn Dodgers and the equally traitorous, me-too-westward-ho! New York Giants. Last of the ninth, home-team Giants down two runs, two men on base, Dodger reliever Ralph Branca winding up, and an outfielder named Bobby Thomson clinched the pennant for the Giants with the home-run “Shot Heard Round the World.”
DeLillo places three guys associated with show biz in the box seats–Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor and Frank Sinatra–along with J. Edgar Hoover, who receives notice during the game that the Russians have just tested a nuclear device. This afternoon is the last moment of communal innocence. The teams will leave New York, the shadow of the bomb hover, society atomize; it’s the beginning of the end. From the ecstatic flurry of torn paper that rains from the upper decks, Hoover plucks a Life magazine reproduction of Bruegel’s famous painting “The Triumph of Death.”
The finale of this extended prologue is also the last moment that a reader knows precisely where he or she stands in “Underworld.” From there the novel bounces, mostly backwards, through the decades from the 1990s to the 1950s, picking up and leaving off a multitude of real and fictional characters, many of whose lives intersect with the lost game ball, last seen disappearing under the feet of a crowd beyond the left-field wall.
We meet Nick Shay, former juvenile delinquent, now a “waste analyst,” and Nick’s younger brother, Matty, chess prodigy also turned technician. Earlier in time (though later in the book’s inverted sequence) we meet Matty’s science teacher in the Bronx, Albert Brozini, who is married to Klara Saxe, who has sex with the 17-year-old Nick before she leaves Albert to pursue a career as an artist that culminates with the painting of 230 decommissioned military aircraft, from one of which Chuckie Wainwright, who once held the ball, dropped bombs on Vietnam. There are nuns and bookies and advertising men and slum kids and folks in “the systems business” in scenes that span the country in a web of connection meant to create a sense of the seamlessness of modern life–a web in which we’re snagged by silken threads of data and media and dread.
DeLillo’s panoramic vision is displayed in sweeping set pieces interspersed throughout “Underworld’s” narrative: besides the Polo Grounds, we are present at a Lenny Bruce concert at Carnegie Hall and the gala revival of a lost Sergei Eisenstein film at Radio City, and together with Hoover’s aide, Clyde Tolson, slip past antiwar demonstrators to attend Truman Capote’s 1966 “party of the century” at the
Plaza Hotel. Coincidentally, Tolson wears a domino mask that recalls a similar getup at a similar costume ball in Russian symbolist Andrei Bely’s masterpiece “Petersburg,” which also involves a ticking bomb about to explode the party, the society, the era, the world.
If DeLillo’s earlier books took a single subject as metaphor–rock ‘n’ roll, Lee Harvey Oswald, hockey–“Underworld” aspires to the grandest possible scope and catches the elusive essence of late-20th Century America’s “drastic grandeur.” Above all, DeLillo is a–maybe the –novelist of this particular place in this fragment of time. But doesn’t everyone write with awareness of a given point of reference? No! Narcissism or ignorance blinds most American writers to their setting. They tend to focus on individuals or social categories while ignoring the kinds of broader insights that “Underworld” packs into every paragraph. DeLillo sees this country as a social, cultural and emotional unity and uses his encyclopedic knowledge of its components to build a literary version of the Watts Towers, the idiosyncratic slum-folk-art construction he briefly mentions, a glittering mass “riddled with epiphanies.” The book bursts with a plenitude of riffs on everything from power and television and weapons (a serial killer calls a reporter to explicate his shooting technique) to the word “It” in the game of tag.
Mostly, however, through Nick, we hear about waste: “Waste is a religious thing. . . . (T)he secret history, the underhistory, the way archaeologists dig out the history of early cultures. . . . (W)e feel a reverence for waste, for the redemptive qualities of the things we use and discard.” Whether it’s true or not, this is the type of speculation that sets the mind of the reader reeling with unexpected apprehension of the detritus of our world. It also creates a tentative hope that by probing the foundations of our civilization we can alter them so that stupid wars and vicious murders won’t occur and life itself won’t be a waste.
In its epic ambition and accomplishment, “Underworld” calls out for comparison with works like those of Bely or Balzac that have defined the consciousness of their age. This is especially incredible–or, rather, blazingly credible–because DeLillo’s writing itself, though intellectual, is neither arcane nor obtuse. Confident in the acuteness of his perceptions, he doesn’t have to bludgeon the reader with five-syllable words. Instead, he manages to convey his “dark knowledge” in language as simple as the book’s structure is complex (e.g. the Rockettes as “kind of great.” At the same time, a vividness and specificity of imagery tells us more about ourselves through the description of items on a refrigerator’s shelves than most other writers can deliver in an entire novel.
Unfortunately, while DeLillo tells us about our lives, he doesn’t tell us much about his characters, and the fiction seems like a framework for the ideas. There’s a disembodied, existential quality about DeLillo’s people–as if some weird membrane that only television and gamma rays can penetrate insulates them from reality. In this way, “Underworld” is the ultimately modern novel, accurate as a smart bomb, down the chimney, into our hearths, but not necessarily our hearts.
Make no mistake, this is a minor qualm about a major work. Perhaps abstraction is the inevitable danger of an abstract universe. Besides, we don’t read DeLillo for mawkish sentiment-mongering or who-done-it theatrics, but intuitions so riveting they make you shake with a hint of a glimmer of genuine understanding of the ineluctable logic hidden beneath the surface of our lives. “Underworld” is a book whose gist is the particular forms of soulless linkage and simultaneous discontinuity we embody. Maybe that’s just its point: All happy ages are alike; each unhappy age is distinct in its own way.
