Underworld: A Novel

UNDERWORLD is so large in scope, its sprawling 800+ pages can barely contain it. It reminds me of a Pynchon romp, which is a good thing. UNDERWORLD encompasses nearly a half century of American life and history, following a cast of characters through the Cold War, the duck-and-cover drills, the Vietnam War, sixties unrest, the civil rights movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1965 Northeast US Blackout, among other major events.It begins with a 60-page prologue putting the reader at the Polo Grounds in New York on that day in October 1951 when Bobby Thompson hits a pennant-winning home run for the NY Giants off of Brooklyn Dodger pitcher Ralph Branca. It came to be called “The Shot Heard Round the World.” Though in reality the home run ball was never found, DeLillo imagines it recovered by a scrawny kid, Cotter Martin, and proceeds loosely to follow the ownership of that ball, in a sort of six-degrees of separation manner, down through the decades.Their paths crisscross, intersect and overlap in an amazing display of literary skill. For example, on page 608 we see Charles Wainwright Jr., one time owner of the ball, navigating a B-52 bomber over Vietnam in 1969, the very same B-52 dubbed ‘Long Tall Sally’ -- with cheeky nose art to prove it -- the very same plane mothballed and depicted in the opening chapters circa 1992 as the canvas for Klara Sax and her band of desert artists. There are many such links, past, present, future.There is nothing here in UNDERWORLD that passes for a plot. Not really. DeLillo builds his edifice with vignettes, short clipped sections, sometimes abruptly shifting in person, place and time. UNDERWORLD is visual, cinematic, in style. His dialogue, unlike any author I’ve read, rings true, authentic, and captures that pragmatic, nonverbal element in conversation, the way shared histories, context, and physical gestures fill in the gaps. And then there’s the conversations that don’t click at all, people just talking past one another.But something else important happened on that day when Thompson hit the home run, something of a more ominous sort that would change lives: the Soviet Union exploded their first atomic bomb. Another “shot heard round the world.”From the 1951 events, the Giants-Dodgers game and the Soviet test explosion, DeLillo jumps to 1992 and the Arizona desert and a group of artists using mothballed B-52s as their canvass. From there, the novel moves backward chronologically, back to 1951. Was this to mimic the countdown of a rocket, or atomic blast? No matter, it works. We see some of the characters in their full development in 1992, then over the next 700+ pages learn how they got that way.It’s a huge cast of characters, many historical figures like J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, Lenny Bruce, Jackie Gleason, and Harry Caray.If there is an overriding theme or motif in the novel, it is the obsession with trash. Garbage. Where the home run baseball is the antithesis of trash - a treasured piece of baseball history - the atomic bomb has the ability to turn the world to trash. And then there’s the problem of the spent plutonium, that ultimate of all hazardous wastes. Even one of the main characters, Nick Shay, owner of the 1951 baseball, works for an international waste company.The Jesuits taught me to examine things for second meanings and deeper connections. Were they thinking about waste? We were waste managers, waste giants, we processed universal waste. Waste has a solemn aura now, an aspect of untouchability. White containers of plutonium waste with yellow caution tags. Handle carefully. Even the lowest household trash is closely observed. People look at their garbage differently now, seeing every bottle and crushed carton in a planetary context. [88]The writing is as good as it gets. And while there is certainly joy in the first reading, I’m finding it equally entertaining after turning that final page to return to the first chapters and reacquaint myself with the characters I just left, forty years older in DeLillo’s reverse chronology, and a few months after I’d begun reading. Like a lot of post-modern literature, UNDERWORLD isn’t for those looking for linear plotting, or plotting at all, for that matter. And the characters are not particularly fleshed out. But the journey is certainly worth the time and effort.

Underworld is an ambitious book. By examining politics, economics, and popular culture in the United States during the last half of the twentieth century, author Don DeLillo engages in some interesting speculation about hidden meanings and connections that lie beneath our notice. In the world that he depicts, people and events sometimes seem to be connected by some kind of field or ether through which unnamable forces operate. In his opening scene, the lives of hundreds of thousands of people are joined by an historic baseball game, where a young man senses "the body heat of a great city ... small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day." In other passages of the book, these connections take the form of history or a system: "that thing you feel in an office ... sensing the linked grids lap around you."The book focuses on Nick Shay, a man with some grit who escapes a meaningless life in the Bronx and becomes an executive in a waste disposal firm and a kind of savant. It takes a long time and many people to produce this transformation, and this results in a pretty long book: 827 pages in the hard cover edition. DeLillo is even more interested in conspiracy theories and secrets than in Nick's personal transformation, so along the way he shares a lot of arcane knowledge with the reader about the nuclear weapons industry, environmental degradation, and J. Edgar Hoover.The connections between a few of the minor characters and subplots and the rest of the book are not obvious, and I would venture to say that a few of these could have been omitted without great harm. Also, DeLillo's dialogue has a definite style: his characters seem to hoard their words, and an awful lot of them don't finish their sentences. Whether these are defects or not probably depends on the reader's tastes. For me, this is a much better book than DeLillo's White Noise and Libra, which have been widely praised.

The book begins with a historic baseball that weaves together several stories across time and space. DeLillo writes like a poet on mescaline.