Saturday, August 22, 2020

Underworld by Don DeLillo / Review


UNDERWORLD
by Don DeLillo


Almost a half-century of history is crammed into Underworld, and the constant interaction of the
diverging plot lines with pop culture events and
socio-political milestones adds to the piquant
flavor of this rambling novel.  
 Underworld starts
with a famous 1951 baseball game, when Giant
Bobby Thomson hits a game-winning home run,
the so-called “shot heard ‘round the world.”
The book wraps up 827 pages later in cyberspace,
where “everything is connected.  All human
knowledge gathered and linked, hyper-linked. . . .
World without end, amen.”



DeLillo, for his part, steers clear of obvious links and hyperlinks in this
massive work.  Instead he jumps freely, and without warning, from
vignette to vignette, character to character, decade to decade.
DeLillo's approach is essentially cinematic, based on masterfully
conceiving and executing discrete scenes and making generous use of
flashbacks.  This large novel defies our expectations of linear narrative
flow, and is instead built carefully, lovingly out of these isolated
tableaus, each one possessing a drive and vitality of its own.  DeLillo
creates a unified whole through juxtaposition and contrast.  To some
extent, the chronology reverses the typical future-directed timeline of
most fiction, and DeLillo himself has likened the structure of the book
to the countdown to zero that precedes a missile or rocket launch

Occasionally DeLillo will hold on to a setting and situation at length, as
in the opening ballgame narrative, which unfolds leisurely over sixty
pages, and involves a wide cast of characters.  But more often DeLillo
presents brief, potent interludes of only a few pages, which he sets up
and delivers with a sure touch, and quickly abandons for the next stop
on our itinerary.  DeLillo is the master of discontinuity, and the
moment you start to settle into the narrative flow is just when you can
count on a change in scenery.

But the cinematic quality of DeLillo's writing is especially evident in his
dialogue.  No modern writer constructs more engaging conversations
than Don DeLillo, and one would need to look to the film industry
(Quentin Tarantino comes to mind) to find someone in his league.  It's
not just clever repartee – heaven knows we hear enough of that on TV
in mind-numbing thirty minute and sixty minute chunks.  Rather it's
DeLillo's rare ability to capture that strange moment when two people
are communicating, but really aren't;  when they are talking past each
other, engaging in conversations that are almost simultaneous
soliloquies.

Yet DeLillo can also present old fashioned descriptive writing of the
highest order.  It may sound surprising, but my favorite passage in this
book is several pages devoted to a description of the different
components that make up a shoe.  This section does little to advance
the plot, but as you have probably picked up by now, this author is not
overly concerned with pushing ahead a linear story line.  Here DeLillo
pauses from his other themes to demonstrate how a great writer can
observe a wealth of details in something so banal that the rest of us
would just ignore it.  If I were picking assigned reading for creative
writing students, this account of how to look at a shoe would be toward
the top of the syllabus.  (Philip Roth offers us a similarly brilliant
interlude on the construction of gloves in 
American Pastoral.  If I
could find a few more of these I would consider compiling a whole
wardrobe anthology.)

However, no DeLillo novel would is complete without the opportunity
for target practice, for satire and irony aimed at an appealing bulls-
eye.  This author is the expert at picking subjects that almost satirize
themselves.  Do you remember the Hitler Studies professor in 
White
Noise
 who couldn't speak German? Well, we have more obvious
targets in 
Underworld.  DeLillo's technique is to take the matter and
anti-matter of culture and force them together to see what happens.  In
Underworld we have J. Edgar Hoover (that name, once full of sturm
und drang
, slowly becoming consigned to the world of comedy)
obsessed with a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.  We have a
former juvenile delinquent growing up to be a successful executive in
the field of garbage.  We have acres of decommissioned military
aircraft taken over by a tribe of avant garde painters, who hope to
transform bombers into works of art.  DeLillo delights in sharp,
ridiculous contrasts, and they have become a trademark of his books.

Yet I am more impressed by the moments when DeLillo abandons his
irony and authorial distance, and enters deeply into the emotional
heart of an interlude.   In 
Underworld he presents a moving sub-plot
involving a young abandoned girl trying to survive in the projects, and
the social workers who hope to rescue her.  This account is so raw and
seemingly unfiltered, that it is hard to believe that it came from the pen
of this quintessentially post-modern author.

Along the way DeLillo tosses in a bevy of real-life figures and historical
events.  In addition to J. Edgar Hoover and Bobby Thomson, we
encounter Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Lenny Bruce, Toots Shor,
the nuclear arms race, and an assortment of various other bits of
contemporary history and popular culture.  If 
Underworld were a
shelf in your home, it would be covered with bric-a-brac, cheap
mementos from past vacations, and a few important sentimental items
almost hidden by the clutter.
Underworld, despite the claims made on its behalf, may not quite
deserve enshrinement as the Great American Novel. I might even steer
readers unfamiliar with this writer first to 
White Noise before urging
them to tackle this big book.  But if you are serious about taking the
temperature of contemporary fiction you will eventually need to come
to terms with 
Underworld. A lot of America has found its way into this
massive work, and it is the author’s most ambitious novel. Much like
Bobby Thomson does at the start of 
Underworld, Don DeLillo has
shown that he too is a Giant who can hit a home run that will long be
heard 'round the world.



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