Underworld, by Don DeLilo (1997), is a colossal
book, written on a colossal scale. Having just finished the book I am left
wondering whether it actually holds together. First of all, it needs to be
noted that Underworld is over 800 pages of brilliant
prose. There's no taking that away from DeLilo. Each sentence is structured
beautifully and the dialogue is word perfect. The ingredients of the book
are strong. It's the connective tissue, the plot, and the sometimes tenuous
linkage of themes, which ultimately leave something wanting for me.
I'm a big fan of DeLilo, so I'm used to the eliptical choppiness of his
writing. Much of DeLilo's writing can be viewed as pastiche, with deliberate
mixing of styles. Deadpan depressive passages brush up easily against patches
of black humor. White Noise, for example, has chapters
of beautiful descriptive weight, followed by pure bathos, undercutting what
has gone before. The deliberate disjunctions of Great Jones Street
and The Names (two of my favorite DeLilo books)
represent an attempt to approach a single subject from multiple perspectives,
and are effective because the books are short enough for the reader to remember,
contain, and make the connections which DeLilo leaves out. But in Underworld
there are parts which just don't seem to fit in at all. This problem, coupled
with the sheer length of the book, makes it hard to contain the story, such
as it is, and makes me think that the book would have been better had it been
edited down. It's a compendium of too much.
Underworld starts off with a lengthy Prologue,
telling the story of the famous 1951 World Series baseball game which culminated
in the home run by Bobby Thompson, famously dubbed “The Shot Heard Round
the World”. Present at the game are J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason,
and Frank Sinatra, sitting together. While at the game Hoover gets news of
another shot from the other side of the world, the first test firing of an
atomic bomb in the Soviet Union. Both “shots” serve as plot structures
in Underworld. The fate of the baseball as it lands
in the stands and is fought over and changes hands is one thread leading out.
The other thread is the nuclear theme. After the home run spectators shower
the field with paper. A large page from Life magazine lands on Hoover. It
is a double page spread of Hieronomous Bosch's grotesque painting, “The
Triumph of Death.” Hoover is mesmerized by the scene. Much later, in
the book's Epilogue, Nick (the main narrator) visits a present day nuclear
waste facility in Kazakhstan and is shown a facility which houses the actual
freak show of deformed patients which Hoover saw in the Bosch painting. Nick,
of course, is unconnected to Hoover, apart from his owning what might be the
actual baseball from the actual World Series game. Such are the tenuous plot
connections.
As in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, waste is
a dominant theme in Underworld. Nick's job is in
waste management, and much of the book is a meditation on the byproducts of
consumer culture. Another theme which DeLilo shares with Pynchon in Underworld
is that of betrayal, a theme which Pynchon explores so well in Vineland.
The first betrayal in Underworld is by a father
who sells the famous world series baseball which his son fought over and brought
home. Other betrayals between husband and wife resonate throughout the book.
None of the book is chronological, jumping around from early fifties to the
mid nineties in freewheeling style. Elements of theme are eked out slowly,
and the plot follows a backward trajectory.
Along the way Lenny Bruce's routines feature heavily. Hoover is also a
key player, and we are allowed to see inside his psyche with such well crafted
sentences as this:
“In the endless estuarial mingling of paranoia and control, the dossier
was an essential device. Edgar had many enemies-for-life and the way to deal
with such people was to compile massive dossiers.” (p. 559)
DeLilo has always been good at describing landscape in such a way as to infuse
it with the innermost musings and fears of his characters. Arroyos, hinterlands,
desert wastes, unmapped areas and estuarial minglings are powerful metaphorical
repositories of experience, as are rooftops, waste lots and heavily peopled
Bronx neighborhoods.
In the end the payoff is not as great as the effort. Underworld
is contained finally, in the same way that a twist tie contains a garbage
sack. There are tremendous passages of sustained brilliance, done in DeLilo's
patented lapidary style, but overall the sum of the parts doesn't quite add
up to a well fashioned whole.