Don DeLillo / The Course of true life / Review by William Boyd

The course of true life

William Boyd reviews Underworld by Don DeLillo
Picador £18, pp828

The 100 best novels / No 98 / Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)

William Boyd

Sunday 1 November 1998

'I

t was a memory that clarified the connections,' muses Nick Shay at one point in this novel, Nick Shay being the central figure and occasional narrator of this extraordinary book. Indeed, if such a massive work can be rendered down to a one-sentence pitch it would be fair to say that the book is about memory the memory of the second half of this fraught, embattled century and about the business of clarifying connections. We are talking about connections that underpin the individual life: connections between people, between private moments, public events, feelings, encounters and objects. DeLillo's grand schema is to chart these undercurrents, this hidden matrix, the invisible warp and weft that knit together our human existence. We all attempt this, of course, from time to time, try to plot and analyse, tabulate and detail the route we have taken. Hindsight is a great retrospective tidier and organiser of the forking paths we have chosen. But what of the connections we don't see? What of the links we haven't spotted? If only we knew what the underworld of our hidden lives revealed, what tangential touchings there were, all the secret causal chains. If we could expose the concealed plumbing and wiring of our brief moment in time our life would, in a way, truly be complete, be fully understood and fixed in history. But how could we possibly achieve this? We can sense them there, instinctively, these secret connections, but we can never trace them through all the buried circuitry. Only all-seeing God, some might say, could highlight the sidetracks and U-turns, the back-doubles and sudden veerings-off. Only a god or a novelist.And Don DeLillo duly starts this, his eleventh novel, in a mode of thrilling bravura, of rip-roaring godlike omniscience. We are in New York at a famous baseball game in 1951 - the Giants versus the Dodgers, a key playoff game, won in the last moment of the last innings with an epic home run. DeLillo roams and roves the stadium, takes us into the minds of the spectators, the cops, the vendors, the sportscasters, the players and the celebrity guests Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and J. Edgar Hoover, among others. (DeLillo writes supremely well about sport; his underrated 1972 novel about American Football, End Zone, is a cool, bleak classic of that curious genre, the sports novel.) In this baseball game, however, when the homer is slugged high into the bleachers, the ball is caught by a young black kid playing hooky from school. This actual baseball becomes the key point de repere of the novel. Its progress through time, its owners, its fate, their fates is the essential cursor that guides us through the labyrinth of the story DeLillo tells.

The novel's central narrative is Nick Shay's, but other narratives spin off from it, belonging to those he knows and loves and hates - family and friends, colleagues and casual acquaintances. Nick, born in 1935 or '36 (the same age as DeLillo, incidentally), grows up in the Bronx, in some poverty and deprivation, a wild unruly kid, probably heading for trouble. He thinks his missing father, a small-time bookie, who walked out one night to buy some cigarettes and never returned, has been 'whacked' by the Mob, and his adolescence is violent and darkly troubled. He has an affair with a married woman and then comes the defining twist. Aged 17, in a meaningless accident, he shoots and kills a friend. He is sentenced for negligent homicide to three years in a juvenile correctional facility and, grimly happy to do his time, he sets about acquiring an education.

From this juncture on, his life becomes more straightforwardly middle-class. He qualifies as a teacher, he marries, he has kids. Then he changes career and moves into the waste-recycling business as an executive, living in Phoenix, Arizona, steadily moving up the corporate ladder. He travels a good deal on waste-related businesses inspecting landfills, attending conferences and while he's away, his wife has an affair with a colleague. There is a confrontation with the lover, Nick and his wife make up and the novel's end and the century's end sees them, middle-aged, their kids grown up, stalled in some kind of benign, middle-class stasis. So far, so relatively mundane. But such a summary does no justice to the complexity and range of this material, conveys no hints of the sheer wealth of insight and information made available to us all 'the texture of collected knowledge,' as Nick describes it. The steadily massing aggregate of hidden connections allows DeLillo to reveal all manner of facts about Nick, about America, the Bomb, the twentieth century, condoms, Lenny Bruce, sex, race, the Bronx, Lucky Strike cigarettes, art, serial killers, cars, J. Edgar Hoover, graffiti and so on, all the 'underhistory' of lives, as he refers to it. DeLillo aficionados will recognise many familiar riffs and tropes from earlier novels the advertising world of Americana, for example, the 'toxic event' of White Noise, the conspiracy theories of Libra.

In Underworld, following baseball through its 50 years, logging all the encounters, the links, the meetings, the connections, DeLillo creates an enormous and astonishingly rich portrait of our lives and times. One example will have to suffice to illustrate the complexities that bind the characters and events of this novel together. Some 600 pages in, we suddenly find ourselves in a B-52 bomber in the Sixties on a bombing run over Vietnam. The character whose point of view we occupy is called Chuckie Wainwright and the bomber has a logo of a pretty girl on its nose and name affixed 'Long Tall Sally'. Slowly, as the episode unfolds, the hidden connections make themselves known to us. Chuckie is the son of an adman who bought the baseball from the father of the kid who caught it. The bombing mission itself is based on an analysis of recon film undertaken by an image interpreter back in Saigon who is called Matt Shay, Nick's younger brother. In the future, the Nineties, when Long Tall Sally has been decommissioned and is parked at an abandoned airbase in the Nevada desert, a conceptual artist called Klara Sax will use the rows of mothballed warplanes as part of a gigantic Bronx. In this way we see how, unknown to all the participants, the death of some hapless peasants on the Ho Chi Minh trail, as the ordnance tumbles down from seven miles up, is paradoxically but intimately connected to the life of Nick Shay and the others all caught in the underworld's viscid and engulfing web.

The novel is full of such subtle and nuanced revelations. As we read we become privy to them because of the book's elaborate construction. We know all about Long Tall Sally's fate as a monument to conceptual art long before we see her at deadly work over Vietnam. When we meet Chuckie we realise we have already spent a day with his father in his Madison Avenue office, the day he decides to give his son the famous baseball. The book starts in 1951 and moves forward immediately to 1992. We cut back and chop about through the decades without regard to chronology. We learn about Nick's wife's affair long before we find out he's a convicted teenage murderer. The link between the hydrogen bomb and human garbage (what we excrete comes back to consume us this century producing the most deadly waste ever created) is established early and its totemic and cataclysmic significance slowly expands as the novel progresses. It is a bold, demanding and almost daunting structure to impose (and done with consummate artistry) but absolutely essential for the novel's overriding metaphor of hidden connection, of buried meaning to function as required.

The structure holds, massily, four-square, magnificently. Another cause for unequivocal acclaim is DeLillo's marvellous prose - a deft and fluent instrument that performs all tasks demanded of it, from heavily wrought lyricism 'The musky coconut balm and the adolescent savour of heat and beach and an undermemory of seawater rush, salt scour in the eyes and nose' to unadorned plainness 'They sat there waiting and they talked.' DeLillo is a realistic novelist and his work is rooted in contemporary life in all its ugliness and grandeur, its rawness and beauty. He takes faith from the 'solid and availing stuff of our experience'. He demands from his readers a suspension of disbelief, he wants you to believe that the stories he is telling are real ones and that these people he is describing are flesh and blood. And, most importantly, he understands that in this realism lies the novel's enduring power as an art form and that a novel's style - both its song and its blunt talk - has to be the servant of this fundamental impulse. And, besides, the sheer freight he is asking this novel to carry, its heft and scope, its immense ambition, necessitate these alternating voices, these contrasting tones and counterpoised moods and cadences.

The novel, as Henry James sagely observed, is a loose baggy monster. This great asset means that the form is unbelievably generous and can withstand stresses and strains that would make other narrative mediums collapse and implode. Underworld is a rousingly impressive achievement in almost every novelistic department - dialogue, structure, timing, precise description, heartfelt veracity and the rest. Of course in a book of this size there are inevitably longueurs. My own feeling is that, conceivably, one would be even more admiring of it had it been 500 pages long instead of 800. Also the character of Klara Sax, a major counterbalance to Nick, never fully engages, in my opinion, and the New York art scene episodes of the Sixties and Seventies read a little thin. But these cavils are luxuries. In Underworld we have a mature and hugely accomplished novelist firing on all cylinders, at the sophisticated height of his multifarious powers. Reading the book is a charged and thrilling aesthetic experience and one remembers gratefully that this is what the novel can do, and indeed does, better than any other art form it gets the human condition, it skewers and fixes it in all its richness and squalor unlike anything else. The novel is the 'great book of life' and as long as there are human beings who are readers it will survive and, with a little luck, even flourish. Don DeLillo's Underworld is a formidably potent and hugely encouraging testimonial to this undeniable, indomitable and strangely consoling fact.

THE GUARDIAN