Underworld – Don DeLillo, 1997 ★★

Everyone's a Philosopher

Can reality be both random chaos and yet somehow mapped out like some endless Fibonacci sequence?

Does the idea of dancing around possible answers to that question over the course of over 40 years and 800 pages strike you as time well spent?

Well, here’s a novel that takes on the whole second half of the 20^th century as it revolved around two concurrent events, the first aerial detonation of a Soviet A-bomb and a home run that decided a National League championship.

It’s familiar territory for readers of Don DeLillo. As one of his characters said in his prior novel about the JFK assassination, Libra: “Coincidence is a science waiting to be discovered. How patterns emerge outside the bounds of cause and effect.”

Coincidence can feel like that. I remember when I first read Underworld. It was early September, 2001, and being the month of 9/11, it wound up lying ignored on my nightstand for a while. Then I caught a look at the cover and nearly coughed up my sternum.

What had seemed like an abstract jacket design now lay revealed. There they were, the now-gone Twin Towers, dominating the cover of DeLillo’s book, wreathed in something that looked very much like smoke as a small object flew toward their midsections.

The smoke was just fog, the flying object a bird. But it freaked me out. It was a while before I went back to reading the book, and as I did I noticed ominous mentions of the World Trade Center, of “suicide vests,” and a videotaped serial killer as if they were semi-divine prophesy:

There is only one truth. Whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world.

An experience like that can put you off a book. Needless to say, I didn’t enjoy Underworld back then. But its pungent memory was enough for me to go back and give it another chance. This time I would appreciate the 9/11 echoes as mere coincidence, not foreshadowing. This didn’t help me with the novel, though; despite DeLillo’s brilliance as a writer the book felt wooly and way too long.

There are three main problems with Underworld as I see it.

1)   The narrative is too jumpy and hard to follow.

2)   The story doesn’t go anywhere.

3)   The tone is unsettled and elliptical.

Taken individually, these wouldn’t be deal-breakers. Underworld isn’t trying to be a straightforward novel; rather it is a tone poem in prose, a musing on the nature of life as seen through the prism of single, momentous acts. DeLillo’s style is described as Faulknerian, which means while time may have meaning it isn’t often linear.

Some of the fun of Faulkner is piecing together the story from its shards, like an investigator at a crime scene. But Faulkner never tried to juggle as many balls at once as DeLillo does here. Dozens of recurring characters make up the cast of Underworld, connecting across the span of time and forming a theme that runs through the book, of finding purpose through interpersonal connections, however fragile.

We eventually succumb to time, it’s true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going.

The book opens at Harlem’s Polo Grounds, in October 1951, where the New York Giants are hosting the Brooklyn Dodgers for a tie-breaking game to determine the National League Championship. A neighborhood boy, Cotter Martin, jumps the turnstile to watch the game the only way he can, without a ticket and out of sight from patrolling ushers.

Meanwhile, in the front seats, national celebrities Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason spectate with Toots Shor, their friend and owner of their regular saloon; and the nation’s top cop, J. Edgar Hoover, not much of an A-lister but always trying to fit in at these big events. Hoover’s somewhat preoccupied by news, not yet public, that the Russians have detonated an atomic bomb, officially commencing what would become known as the Arms Race.

The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants sends Ralph Branca's pitch into the left-field stands and history on October 3, 1951, which is where Underworld begins. Image from https://www.si.com/specials/100-greatest/?q=15-the-shot-heard-round-the-world.

As a fellow in the stands explains to the gate-jumper: That’s the thing about baseball, Cotter. You do what they did before you. That’s the connection you make. There’s a whole long line. A man takes his kid to a game and thirty years later this is what they talk about when the poor old mutt’s wasting away in a hospital.

DeLillo moves his frame of reference from Cotter hiding in the shadows to the celebrities in the front row to Russ Hodges, a radio announcer whose call of this famous game remains one of its enduring legacies. There is also some attention to the field of play, the pitcher Ralph Branca zeroing in while batter Bobby Thomson waits to deliver “the Shot Heard ‘Round The World.” But the game itself is secondary. Throughout Underworld, DeLillo’s interest is less in cause than effect.

The most famous part of Hodges’ famous call was his repeating a single phase: “The Giants win the pennant!” So it goes with DeLillo, too, who uses repetition throughout Underworld as a kind of motif, with lines called back from prior vignettes as a sort of jazzbo underlining.

The home-run ball that wins the game disappeared into legend. In Underworld, it is snatched up by the fast-moving Cotter Martin. Eventually, in a series of narrative interludes, we learn how the ball migrates from Cotter to his no-account father to a Madison Avenue sales executive and eventually to Nick Shay, once a product of the Bronx who grew into an executive at a high-flying waste disposal company. Nick is also the nominal lead character in the book, one of a few we meet at different periods from the early 1950s through to the early 1990s.

The narrative zooms in on different people at different times. We meet Klara as a divorced artist in the 1970s and an unsettled housewife having an affair with a teenaged Nick in the 1950s. A navigator flying a mission over Vietnam contemplates the ball his father gave him from that big Giants playoff game in 1951. Lenny Bruce puts in several appearances around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. (“We’re all gonna die!” is a line he keeps repeating, very apropos even if it is premature here.)

All the time, everyone is philosophizing, like a gang of speed-freak Greek philosophers:

It’s a dream someone’s dreaming that has me in it…

Sister Grace believed the proof of God’s creativity eddied from the fact that you could not surmise the life, even remotely, of his humblest shut-in…

He wanted to recite the destinies of a hundred linked souls, the street swarm that roared in his head…

Everything is connected in the end.

Underworld meanders across various tangents. Some, like an affair Nick’s wife is having with his co-worker, get resolved. Others, like a sniper whose highway killing winds up on CNN, float away. They are all connected by DeLillo as narrative strands; they just don’t make sense.

Here’s the thing: DeLillo’s such a bold and engaging writer that there are times in Underworld where this doesn’t matter. You come to enjoy the way the prose passages roll over you back and forth like the tides. That’s the effect he’s after, and on and off it kind of works in its high-art-aiming, low-culture-informed way.

The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.

There are moments of humor and grace sprinkled throughout Underworld. The opening section at the Polo Grounds justly gets much praise for the way DeLillo bores in on the various points-of-view criss-crossing in the ether as the game is taken in. This part of Underworld would become a novella of its own four years later, “Pafko At The Wall.” Even if it labors for cosmic significance with allusions to Bruegel’s painting “The Triumph Of Death,” the opening has a sense of place and time which sets up high expectations for what follows.

The problem for me is that those expectations aren’t met, even when DeLillo, a masterful mood-setter if not a scenarist, gets much right detailing the different eras. The book stretches itself so far and so thin that there’s little opportunity to connect with the many people we meet. In the last part of the novel, DeLillo pulls in new tangents, like the victims of radiation leaks in the now-former Soviet Union and a homeless girl murdered in the Bronx who becomes an object of veneration when her face mysteriously appears on a billboard. There’s even a glimpse of the future that feels right on, an extended elegy to the internet as a repository of lost souls. But they feel random all the same.

Many praise Underworld’s range and ambition as signature examples of raising the art of the novel in the 21^st century. I wish DeLillo had contented himself to bore in on one plot strand and fleshed it out more, without the interconnection business. I see why he aimed as high as he did, and the result was certainly a literary event of its time. But the more time passes, the more I wonder how enduring a work this really is.