Underworld

Underworld by Don DeLillo is huge—huge in the way that the United States is huge. This book, like our nation, is crowded with people, places, events and inexhaustible energy. It’s got jazz, atomic testing, J. Edgar Hoover, flavored condoms, baseball, graffiti artists, inner city nuns, Jayne Mansfield, websites, Lenny Bruce, 50’s doo-wop, chess and Mikhail Gorbachev’s birthmark. And that’s just for starters.

The novel, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1997, is a gargantuan undertaking by DeLillo (who also wrote Libra and The Names) and it is one of the most breathtaking volumes of literature you’ll read in this or any century.

Underworld covers a lot of territory and envelopes a cast of characters so diverse show more that DeLillo puts filmmaker Robert Altman to shame. But, just like Altman’s classics Nashville and Short Cuts, everything gels just perfectly by the final page.

The story opens at a baseball game. But not just any baseball game. It is Oct. 3, 1951 and the Dodgers are battling the Giants for the World Series pennant in the final game of the contest. J. Edgar is there, so are Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra, cheering and kvetching and downing ball park franks. Did it really happen this way? Were they really there at the game? Probably not. But I will say this as an aside: DeLillo’s writing was so convincing that when J. Edgar Hoover picked up a discarded Life magazine and was attracted to a photo inside, I wrote to the editors at Life to see if I could get my hands on that back issue just to see what Hoover saw. That’s how compelling DeLillo’s writing is.

Also attending the game is a young boy named Cotter who catches the game-winning home run smacked up into the stands. That one baseball, with its raised seams and tiny smudge of bat tar, resonates throughout the whole book as it passes from hand to hand over the next forty years.

By starting Underworld in New York’s Polo Ground with a crowd of 35,000, DeLillo describes a dizzying array of characters. His sentences—nay, the very words—tumble one after the other, panning from person to person like a restless camera. It’s an incredible feat and it works so well for those first 60 pages that the rest of the novel almost feels a little drained. It’s like putting the high-wire act before the rest of the circus. In fact, this opening prologue is so good, you could tear out the pages, put them behind glass in a museum and call it True Art. Here’s the next-to-last line, coming after fifty-nine pages of atomic literary energy: "Shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders and stray yawns, the sand-grain manyness of things that can’t be counted."

DeLillo’s prose is full of such "sand-grain manyness," moving effortlessly through place and time as it charts its cast of thousands. Central to the story are Nick Shay and Klara Sax who were briefly lovers back in the 1950s and who meet again in the 90s. Events ricochet off these two people, setting off a string of circumstances that, yes, eventually connect to the home-run baseball.

If you like the writings of E.L. Doctorow, you’ll love Underworld which mixes historic figures with fictional characters much like Doctorow’s Ragtime. But DeLillo goes Doctorow one better by infusing these pages with a jazzy rhythm that’s unique and invigorating. His words practically put bubbles in your blood.

Open Underworld at random and you’ll come across some great passages that will stand the test of time. Idly flipping through the pages, I found these two outstanding paragraphs in various locations:

"A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide inside the smallest event."

"It was the time of Nixon’s fall from office but she didn’t enjoy it the way her friends did. Nixon made her think of her father, another man of frazzled mind, rehearsed in his very step, his physical address, bitter and distant at times, with a loser’s bent frame, all head and hands."

As we close out the last days of this century, I can think of no better book to recommend than Underworld for the way it captures the American character of the past 50 years. DeLillo’s scope is big and breathy and almost, but not quite, stretches itself to the limit. You can practically hear the plausibility twanging like an overstretched rubber band. Even if you can’t quite grasp it all, you know for certain that you’re in the hands of a master. show less

Disclaimer: It is entirely possible I did not understand this book at all and what follows is meaningless babble.

Of all the books I have ever read I believe Underworld might be the hardest to review. Not because of the star rating. That is a 5 without question. The writing here is dazzling. This is historical fiction deconstructed, reconstructed, and then thrown into a supercharged industrial blender and shot out into the cosmos. Our “hero” works in “waste management” and a recurring theme here is the creative ways we prettify the fact of our waste products, from actual shit to plutonium waste, helping us to ignore the fact that all this waste, submerged or made into building materials or buried, or whatever, is destroying the show more planet. The parallel between the way in which DeLillo treats historical fiction (and the way he treats history for that matter) and the waste management sleight of hand is a terrifying yet fun way to render evil genius. He turns the metaphors used by marketers to make the most pernicious toxic things seem like gifts to the world into a metaphor for humans creating a glossy version of the past and future they can live with. He uses a central metaphor as a second central metaphor. It is breathtaking.

DeLillo seems to repudiate nostalgia here (a concept I wholeheartedly embrace.) The past is special because we want it to be special. We create false memories and expunge anything problematic. The value of memory is no more than mass delusion. “Every memory we have is, finally, of ourselves. If the memory of an experience is flawed, there is a rift in the continuity of self.” We are fiddling with the past, creating a good-ol-days myth in order to get a hit of dopamine and forget we are inexorably moving toward an end we ourselves have ordained. The past is filled with as much or more evil than the present but people agree to apply and validate the nostalgia filter because mass delusion gives us succor and hope in a harsh and hopeless world. That nostalgia filter is no different from the delusions of people who see statues of the Virgin Mary weep or the face of Jesus in a water stain on a building, just a delusion born of privilege rather than want.

Despite Underworld's brilliance as a whole, and maybe because there is no plot (as there is no plot in life) sometimes the whole thing seems to kind of fall apart. There are lulls – long lulls that left me pretty disconnected from the rest of the story. But, though it wanders off frequently, the book comes charging back every time to this concept of life and memory as a euphemism, like Glenn Close popping up spring-loaded in Michael Douglas’ tub. When I was poking around trying to pump myself up to read this book, I came across a quote from Martin Amis’ review of this book that really sums things up: “Underworld may or may not be a great novel, but there is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great novelist.” Those lulls are problematic, but they are the packaging for utter brilliance.

Lenny Bruce comes up a lot in this book. He is not simply mentioned. DeLillo recreates several Bruce performances while tunneling into Bruce’s brilliant, tragic, overfilled head. While this is well done I started wondering a bit past the halfway point why Don kept doing this and why he kept focusing on the way Bruce ping-ponged between funny traditionally structured bawdy insightful jokes and profound, decidedly unfunny, observations about human cruelty and idiocy and brilliance, and the inevitability that those things will drive us to destroy ourselves (Bruce’s tagline, “we’re all gonna diiiiiiiiiiiiie,” is the chorus here.) At first it was easy to connect Bruce’s routines to the specter of nuclear annihilation. After wondering about that for a while I realized that DeLillo had coopted Bruce’s structure for this book. He intersperses incredibly funny and traditionally structured scenes with profound, decidedly unfunny observations about human cruelty and idiocy, and brilliance, and the inevitability that those things will drive us to destroy ourselves. I think DeLillo uses some of the lulls the same way as the humor. All of it wraps up profound truth, Delillo is a modern-day Lenny who understands you can't keep an audience with a spare recitation of terrifying truth.

A couple of random notes on things that really impressed me. First, while parts of this book are firmly rooted in the language and thought processes of the 60’s. 70’s and 80’s DeLillo was disturbingly prescient, and much of this feels very current. He saw the danger of things that have now come to roost but which when this was written most just saw as progress. Second, the book launches with what could easily have been published as a free-standing novella set at one of the most famous baseball game moments ever (Bobby Thomson’s walk-off home run in the 1951 National League Dodgers- Giants pennant game a/k/a “the shot heard round the world.”) This opening novella stands as one of the finest pieces of writing I have ever read. Even if you decide not to invest in this giant book, 827 pages that require complete mental focus pretty much all the time, you should read the first part. You should bear in mind though that the epilogue is a response of sorts to that opening bit of nostalgia. The ending also, it gives us some closure on the baseball which is hit in the opening and sails through these pages. Never has a baseball worked this hard, but though dinged up it manages to knit the book together.

I will shut up now and hope at least a couple of people will be inspired to take on this boulder of a book.

*This book weighs about 10 pounds. It is not totable so I got the audio to listen to on the subway, and I read the hardcover at home. The audio was enjoyable so I don't not recommend it, but this is a book you want to read in print. When I listened on the train and got home and picked up the book it felt like I had never seen/heard the portions I listened too. I couldn't figure out where I was. Nearly every time I listened I ended up going back and reading the text. show less

Voltaire is best known today for a novella and being a bit of a prick (in an enlightening way), but he also wrote a number of epic poems, including the first (?) epic poem in French, the Henriade. This was reprinted dozens of times during his life. The epic was the great literary genre of the eighteenth century, in theory. Now, of course, nobody gives a shit, because that stuff is utterly unreadable. Our 'epics' are long novels, and, like the Henriade, they get laurels aplenty, despite being all too often unreadable. Authors continue to churn them out, because critics adore a behemoth.

Sometimes, it's best to just admit defeat. There are a few things worth critically adoring in Underworld:

i) The fact that DeLillo was ballsy enough to show more tell the story backwards.
ii) Any scene with the nuns and priests in it.
iii) A few patented DeLillo symbol-objects, here, the painted planes in the desert and the giant ship carrying garbage/heroin/nuclear waste/who knows what.

These are undermined, though, by, e.g.,

ia) The fact that he doesn't have any story to tell, so telling it backwards adds nothing.
iia) There are too few scenes with the nuns, and too many with the very boring Nick Shay. How many men who've blown off another man's head with a shotgun (accidentally, but still), and had an affair with a super-hot modern artist who attracts disciples like black clothes attract dog hair, could be *this* boring? Only one, Nick Shay, and Delillo writes about him for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages.
iiia) Those symbol-objects can carry books the length of, say, White Noise. This book is 827 pages long. Not even the painted planes in the desert can carry a book for that long.

So we're breaking even (I'm being generous). How about the ideas?

By far the most intelligent, and humorous, scene in the book comes in chapter 3 of part 4. We get to watch people watch an apocryphal Eisenstein film, called 'Underworld.' Some characters' reactions:

a) "The plot was hard to follow. There was no plot. Just loneliness."
b) Esther said, "I want to be rewarded for this ordeal."
c) "Admit it, you're bored."
d) "It was remote and fragmentary and made on the cheap, supposedly personal, and it had a kind of suspense even as it crawled along. How and when would it reveal itself?"
e) "What about the politics? She thought this film might be a protest against socialist realism... what was this murky film, this strange dark draggy set of images if not a statement of outrage and independence?"
f) "Do we have to stay for the rest of it?" "I want to see what happens." "What could happen?"
g) "The camp elements of the program... now tended to resemble sneak attacks on the dominant culture."
h) "All Eisenstein wants you to see, in the end, are the contradictions of being."

This is transparently about the novel, *Underworld*. There is no plot, it is an ordeal, it is boring, it is remote and fragmentary, you do kind of want to know if/when it will reveal itself or something will happen, it could easily be nothing more than a statement about the supposed 'contradictions of being'. And you can, if you like, read all of that as a giant protest against realism.

So, given that our author is aware of the book's flaws (you can protest against realism and be entertaining, by the way),how can we justify its existence? In its intellectual content? That content is ambiguous, in a good way: DeLillo asks us to consider the relationship between nostalgia (for, e.g., baseball) and history (i.e., things that will matter to mentally sound people who didn't live through them). It would be nice to think that this book treats reverence for baseball and various other, even more cheesy, mass cultural ways of extracting money from people ironically: of course it's fun to go watch baseball, but it's not particularly important.

I fear, however, there is no irony, and that Underworld is just a depressing, postmodern affirmation of 'everyday life,' that looks back with longing (somewhat paradoxically, given the aforementioned pomoness) to the Cold War, back when the Giants and Dodgers were still New York teams. I fear that Underworld's main point is to show how Capital-H History disposes of all the glorious little knick-knacks we nostalgize about, like, say, baseballs, and how we have to hang onto them and make sure we get to stay individuals and live authentically even though The Man doesn't want us to. Consider that the most memorable scene in the book, according to the internet I read, is when the priest tells Nick 'Boring' Shay that he's tired of educating teenagers in "abstract ideas" and would be better off educating them as to the names of particular concrete things like, e.g., the names of shoe-parts, which he then proceeds to name for a few pages. How poetic it is that he knows what to call the cuff, counter and vamp. What a lesson in "the depth and reach of the commonplace".

If a book is going to argue for the depth and reach and importance of the quotidian, and eschew any attempt to connect its various chunks, those chunks had better be glorious. That is not the case here. I just don't care about the moments that DeLillo chooses not to connect to each other.

Now, of course, that wouldn't matter too much if the writing was good, but, as other reviewers have cataloged, it is not. Who let the following phrase slop into existence? Because it couldn't have been Don DeLillo: "Matt drove west, deeper into the white parts of the map, where he would try to find a clue to his future." I'd love to say I've made it look worse, but the preceding clause involves the phrase 'soft dawn.'

Underworld is not funny, as some DeLillo books are. It is not as well written as many of them are. It is not intellectually interesting as a couple of them are. It neither asks, nor answers, important questions, as DeLillo is capable of doing. It is, however, long; it is ambitious; and it was published before everything in the U.S.A. went to poop thanks to financial speculation, war and incompetence. So people call it a Great American Novel, and pine for the time before Osama, Bush and the Great Recession, just like they pine for the good ol' days in the ballpark.

It is the Henriade of a very talented man, not his Candide. show less

definitely too long but what else are you going to do with something that insanely ambitious? it takes stamina to even think about something like this, much less write it down. maybe cut the Lenny Bruce parts out because I cannot care about that guy ever. but holy moly. so much of it was so intense. Nick frightens me and I understand why this is Jughead's book. There is something also very known to me about this book? Or about Nick, that kind of drives me crazy. The writing was intense, as always, but it was such a different texture with Underworld than Libra, or White Noise. other people have described Underworld as being funny, but maybe because of what I'm living through right now, without the even pretend gloss of the end of the show more Cold War, America in the 90s, it's hard to find anything funny, and everything terrifying. I bet Jughead sees himself as Nick and thats scary because I see myself as Nick too. show less

There is an important reason why Underworld is written from future to past. The artist in the desert, painting a deactivated aircraft from the cold war times, is trying to process the past from a nation that is lost to time. Such an understanding must arise from the creation of meaning to fill in the gaps, as she does with the pin-up girl left as a souvenir in the B-52. What she tries to process is as much the story of a nation in the uncertain limbo between the ending of an era and the start of a new one, where things just do not seem real, as she remarks, as it is about herself, and a past that cannot be recalled, even if it made her as she is today, as well as the man who comes searching for it in her in 1992.

History can only be show more understood by walking backwards in time. What explains each scar is a story that is not told upright, but hidden in between every line. Underworld follows DeLillo's usual tropes of dialogue, where everything that's important is everything that is not mentioned. It's just not possible to understand the paranoia of nuclear threat, you have to live under it. Yet this is what we try, to make sense of everything that's happening. This is why the story is told backwards: the reason behind every event lies in something happening just before that. Underworld is a story about a nation just how it is about each one of its inhabitants.

That's why I find this book so incredibly dense and hard to read. Every part has enough content to be a standalone book, but every line is meaningless if not attached to a before and after. Such complex relationships are multisided, revealing something that does not concern only those immediately involved. That's why Nick Shay is allowed to hold the ball from the shot heard round the world, and to claim it is a symbol of defeat. show less

Personalmente ho sempre odiato le classifiche, tipo quelle di Hornby in 'High fidelity' - che tra l'altro mi è piaciuto. Oppure quelle stronzate da 'libro nell'isola deserta' , che pochi hanno visto e pochi possono permettersi - a meno di naufragare in un serial tv americano, dove di libri ne appaiono comunque assai pochi...Ad ogni modo, nell'ipotesi ridicola di dover salvare un solo libro dal Diluvio Universale, imbarcandolo a fianco di Noè e dei suoi animali copulatori, penso che questo testo di narrativa potrebbe permettere di ricostruire da zero la civiltà statunitense dell'ultima metà del secolo scorso, nella sua materialità, immaterialità e religiosità, laica e non. Ci sono frasi, paragrafi e intere pagine che, come le show more olive, possono essere spremute a freddo, a caldo, trasformate in pasta, e saranno sempre generose di senso e significato. La loro densità è così pregna da poter generare storie infinite negli occhi del lettore. La potenza delle immagini, degli intercalari, dei dialoghi, è qualcosa che va oltre la narrativa finora conosciuta. Un prodotto dalla potenza di un diamante grezzo radioattivo, e uno schiaffo molisano ai mediocri scrittori che popolano le classifiche da spiaggia. show less

What a long, strange trip this book is.

Extraordinary, and truly unique. Its power comes from the layering of seemingly disparate story lines and characters back and forth in time and place. The cumulative effect is ultimately staggering.

Yes, it's an excessive and uneven mess. But it's a glorious mess. So full of life and ideas. And funny as hell.

My wife asked, "What's it about?" and I didn't know where to begin. Baseball? The Cold War? Garbage? Family? Technology? Big government and corporate greed? Consumer culture? Marriage and relationships? Religion? Ethics? Crime and punishment and rehabilitation? Art? Race? Celebrity? New York City? America? History and memory?

Whatever. It doesn't matter. It's an exhilarating and unforgettable show more joyride.

Pair this novel with Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" and "Freedom" and you won't get a much better sense of America since World War II -- how we live, and the world we live in. show less