Rarely does a back-cover blurb make you stop and think, but as I was reaching the halfway point of Don DeLillo's masterpiece (one of several) Underworld, this one caught my attention. It's a very true sentiment. A masterpiece should make you a better reader, and probably a better human, by pulling you up to its expectation of what its reader should be. And in this, Underworld is truly no exception, as my own history with it shows. I've enjoyed DeLillo's writings for a long time. I began with his novel of postmodern disaffection White Noise and moved on to the emotional experimentation of The Body Artist and I was hooked. But as I started Underworld ten years ago, I was still young, and I did not yet possess what the book needed me to possess. I lasted all of a hundred pages before realizing I wasn't sufficiently entrenched to prevent being pulled away by other things. Years later I bought a hardback copy of the 800+ page book, certain that what was inside it was going to be important to me, but after another half-hearted attempt at a time when I was between other interests, I drifted away again.
I started the book again recently, and by page two it was a completely different experience. Something connected, and as I reached the halfway point and saw the blurb about how to read a masterpiece, the difference between now and then became clear. In the intervening years, my focused interests in various periods and cultures of the past hundred years had become a full-blown intellectual obsession with the 20th century in general, and the American 20th century in particular. For my relationship to this book, that fact made all the difference, as Underworld is an odyssey into the heart of that very idea, an investigation of what DeLillo refers to in the book as "the curious neuron web of lonely-chrome America."
The story begins in 1951 as the Dodgers and the Giants (both still New York teams at the time) are playing for the pennant. Baseball fans may remember this game as the origin of the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" as Bobby Thomson sent a home run into the stands in the ninth inning to seal the pennant for the Giants. The book follows the home run ball as it ends up in the hands of a young boy who skipped school to see the game and then proceeds to change owners throughout the last half of the 20th century as various owner's fortunes rise and fall. As one might expect, the story is not really about the ball, it is about the people. The ball exists as its own part of the story, but the conceit of the ball is that it provides access to dozens of different narratives and perspectives on America from 1951 to the mid-1990's.
Another significant strand of the story begins on the very same day as the game-winning swing, as the Russians successfully detonate an atomic bomb, which sets in motion the nuclear tension that runs through the rest of the century as well as the rest of the novel. It's that atomic fear that acts as a poetic parallel to the various stresses and the sense of unease that permeate the story, which is broken up into several large sections, each of which could probably have functioned as admirable novellas in its own right. As the cast of characters that ripple out from that home run take their places in the narrative sweep, one begins to see how each perspective is masterfully placed to fill in a piece of the story as well as a piece of the history. Waste management engineer Nick Shay, with his murky past and strange connection to artist Klara Sax, shows us how the guilts and fears that we try to bury never stay that way for long. Chess teacher Albert Bronzini, elderly nun Sister Edgar, and 16-year-old graffiti artist Moonman157 are all pushed and pulled in various directions as the century tosses them about like a rock polisher. Historical figures show up in the book as often as DeLillo's own creations. It's a risky endeavor, but he pulls it off, and his versions of personalities like Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, Lenny Bruce, and J. Edgar Hoover never seem obtrusive or distracting. He plays them as they are, just more bits of the story of America.
The idea of the Great American Novel is that of a piece of literature that excels in its craft while simultaneously providing an accurate representation of the zeitgeist with which it is concerned. With those parameters in mind, I see no reason not to at least consider Underworld as a candidate for the label. The writing is outstanding, with the author's signature dialogue fragments and hitches in character speech firmly in place, but it's the way that the story knits together from the macro to the micro into a panoramic view of forty-some years of American life that really shows DeLillo's mastery of the form. The novel reads true, even as fiction, as it portrays Cold War America as both consistent and invisibly dangerous, just like uranium-235, or for that matter, Coca-Cola.
