Underworld

Underworld is one of my all time favorites. It beautifully written, layered, complex, with very rich characters that will keep you thinking long after finishing the novel. It follows multiple people, diverse, yet similar in that they are searching for meaning, understanding, love, and everything that we are all searching for, over the last 50 years of American society. The event that begins the novel is the shot heard round the world. Ostensibly this is the dramatic Bobby Thomson home run that miraculously won the pennant for the Giants. Ironically, the other shot heard round the world the same day was the USSR's first nuclear detonation which began the cold war and left Americans living for the first time under a cloud of fear of immediate destruction. Perhaps something changed at that time in the American psyche. Certainly these two events are juxtaposed and central to the novel. The characters come from this conflicted time in history and the reader follows them intently over the next 50 years. Their lives are described through a series of short stories or vignettes that are linked in some cases randomly, by transition of ownership of the famous baseball, by friendships, brief affairs, chance meetings, or involvement with the arms race. In some cases famous historical figures such as J. Edgar Hoover, and Lenny Bruce enter the novel. These moments are darkly humorous, but also very touching in the human and vulnerable portrayal of these individuals. I found them welcome interludes to the fictional narrative. The novel contains multiple characters. Nick Shay is probably the main one. He is a tough kid growing up in the Bronx in the 50's, scarred when his father disappears. He is involved in an accidental shooting in his teens, then attends a jesuit school, and finally becomes an executive for a major waste management company. He is a deeply thoughtful individual and there are many vignettes about modern waste management which range from hilarious to frankly disturbing. There are other main characters beside Nick equally rich in description and depth of portrayal, artists, chess players, teachers, nurses, nuns. A great diverse group of people trying to find meaning through love and work in these difficult times. One also finds many minor characters in the novel such as the Texas Highway Killer who may have only a vignette or short story. I think that they give a sense of this conflicted time in American society and add to a certain bleakness to the landscape of the book. This emptiness and sense of human frailty is part of the underworld of the novel that the characters seek to resolve. The journey can never be completely finished, but I had a sense of optimism after finishing the novel.

As a baseball fan, and more specifically a Phillies fan who had his own "shot heard 'round the world" off the bat of Joe Carter, the image of the baseball as a mark of failure is both poetic and real to me. The scenes involving Nick Shay brooding over his expensive baseball of disputable origin strike the reader and mold an enigmatic character who is looking to not lose anything else in his life after lamenting over his radio echoing Bobby Thomson's success at the plate. More real than the baseball, is Delillo's eerily mimetic portrait of America, both in the time of baseball's heyday and the Cold War. Through the eyes of Nick Shay, as a waste management business man, the reader gets a true feeling of the lost, unsatisfied, yet still successful American man. As a reader understanding the feeling of loss, as a baseball game gone wrong can bring, Delillo takes it to an absurd level, which begs the question: What is really important to Americans? Delillo's novel points out that a feeling of emptiness and insignificance is a big part of the average American's dissatisfaction with the minutia of daily life. Through work, affairs, and flaky friends, Nick Shay shows up as a true American in a life hardly romanticized by the American dream as he literally deals with the trash of America on a daily basis. The message of this novel is deep and complex, and sometimes lost in the excessive development of extra characters. This complexity and depth in the novel provides for hours of contemplation, leaving a reader left only to consider what the souvenir baseball is in their own lives.

The long novel seems incompatible with our society's, and my own, preference for instant gratification and declining attention span. But this is an 800 page novel that carries you effortlessly from place to place, with an incisive vision of American life over the past 50 years. The content happily varies between comic and tragic, profound and pedestrian. And the first 100 pages are the so riveting and powerful that they ought to be required reading for every American: it's rare to see such a sustained intensity over 100 pages, nevermind that he manages to not lose much over the next several hundred pages. Describing the content will not help the reader any better than describing the content of Leaves of Grass would. The story, such as there is one, surrounds a celebrated baseball, nuclear paranoia, J. Edgar Hooever, an artist in the desert, an obsessive compulsive nun and the "main" character, a kind of everyman who works with the "underworld" of material/cultural waste. DeLillo's blazing talent is weaving these disparate elements into a coherent and meaningful whole, serving as a kind of counterweight to Eliot's disintegrated Waste Land, constructing from a meditation on debris and refuse a powerful vision of human meaning, as it is lived today. Given the trumpet-sounding theme, one can forgive the book's ending for being a bit cheesy - it is disappointing to hit a flat note at the end of the tune, but the symphonic precession is none the less for it. All in all, this book is an American masterpiece, one of the few produced since the decline of Modernism.

... Don DeLillo is an acquired taste. He loves repetition,which drives many readers mad. He has a powerful worldview, centeredon conspiracies and secret meanings. Political conservatives often despise him. If you are new to DeLillo, you may very well enjoy his books. But please, do NOT start your DeLillo reading with this book. Start with a small, funny book like End Zone. Ease into White Noise, Mao II or Libra ... then take a crack at Underworld.For those in touch with DeLillo's dry humor and in love with those picture perfect sentences that seem to appear out of thin air, Underworld is the ultimate feast. It is a culmination of his themes about modern America ... but it's also a miraculous collection of vignettes.What other writer would dare imagine a series of Lenny Bruce monologues during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Or conjure up a forgotten Eisenstein film? Or rediscover the bizarre coincidence of Frank Sinatra, Toots Shoor, Jackie Gleason and J. Edgar Hoover all attending the Giants-Dodgers playoff game?I'm in awe of DeLillo. His universe may be cold and spare, but I believe that's because he sees our world more clearly than most. He gets under the emotions and styles of the day ... he finds the secret histories. END

Underworld is full of what makes Delillo great: repetitive phrases that resonate like traffic sounds or words in one's head; quirky references to pop culture and American history with relevance to everything and everyone; obscure connections that allways lurk below the surface of an event. His characters, with this book in particular, are given a life with which they talk and argue, love and fight, and look to the future as they remember the past. The descriptive language is amazing. Very well written.