Underworld

"Underworld , where to begin? It’s the kind of book that makes me want to make superlative, hyperbolic claims, like “the greatest novel of the twentieth century”. I read it in my last year of university; it was one of those reading experiences I can recall specifically. I just sat in the library in the same chair for four days and all I did was read Underworld ; it was completely overwhelming. I just finished this novel called Flights , by Olga Tokarczuk, which has a description of a brilliant professor’s mind and the freakishness of it—his wife asks herself how all that mind and all that knowledge could fit into a person without his head becoming a sort of enormous, distended monstrosity. Reading Underworld , I felt that same kind of almost-monstrous overwhelm. It’s such an extraordinarily vast and all-reaching book. Much of it is set in New York, and I think one thing DeLillo does so brilliantly—and does better than anyone else—is create a sense of cross-currents and coincidence. Of course, Manhattan is mainly a grid system of streets, so it really serves the book’s depiction of intersecting forces and intersecting lives. I loved and tried to steal some of that sense of the city enabling collisions, as well as the novel’s network of signs and their resonance. Obviously only DeLillo can do it like DeLillo but still, us flailing awed mortals have to try. It’s quite rare that I reread things, but a year or so ago I reread Underworld . So, a decade on. First it was extraordinary in that it didn’t live up to my memory, it exceeded it. It was even more of a work of genius than I thought. But there’s also so much that I hadn’t seen when I was twenty-one, because we’re all kind of dumb when we’re twenty-one—well I bet DeLillo wasn’t. For example, he’s so great in Underworld on the way men and women interact. No one seems to talk about that, probably because gender wasn’t as fashionable a topic in 1997. It’s a mind-blowing book, everyone should read it. It does: J Edgar Hoover and Lenny Bruce, there’s also a lot of slightly fictionalised history. Yeah, that’s true. That takes us back to where we began, and the fact that, because New York is so known, it has such a corpus of consensus reality surrounding it. There are limits to how far you can fictionalise it, at least if you’re working in a broadly realist realm. There’s something in New York that’s resistant to radical revision in fiction. There are some elements of it that are solid—and no less resonant for being so—and you have to work with them, you can’t completely rewrite or overturn. Absolutely. Baggy’s a good word. It’s endlessly expanding; it’s a capacious city."

"One important thing to know about Underworld is that it is Don DeLillo’s masterwork. If you take his whole oeuvre, he has a warm-up period of five to six novels. Then he hits a novel called The Names , and from that book, about five novels on, we have Underworld . That period, from The Names to Underworld is an amazing stretch in literature. He’s really on his game and does absolutely fantastic work. But I would say Underworld caps it. It’s just a wonderful novel to read, though challenging. It comes out in 1997, so it’s the last novel that he writes in the 20th century, which is very apt, as it has this theme of moving on from periods of history. It’s about history from the period before the Second World War, very firmly into the Cold War, and the period following the Cold War. DeLillo sees the post-World War Two period as a time of decline and decay. The old, pre-World War Two world is simultaneously decaying and falling apart in front of us and it’s being recycled. This is an important theme across DeLillo and a common postmodern theme: We live in a world now of recycling. We don’t make new things. We take what was old and we repurpose it and change it. In Underworld , this is shown with the baseball. The novel begins with an absolutely fabulous prologue: people say it’s the best prologue ever written. It’s called “The Triumph of Death.” It’s only 40 pages long—so you could read the prologue by itself and then decide whether you want to read the other 800 pages or not. That might be a good way into Underworld. It opens with a 1951 baseball game. That’s typical DeLillo, mixing in mundane things, like going to see a baseball game—though this is by no means a banal game. It’s the 1951 World Series, when Bobby Thomson, the batter for the Giants, hits the ‘shot heard around the world.’ That moment is the pinnacle of the enthusiasm of the old world, the pre-war period. The ball that Bobby Thomson hits is caught by a young kid called Cotter Martin, who has bunked off school to see the game. This ball then becomes something that runs through all 900 pages of the novel. It keeps cropping back up, because it’s a relic of the world that has gone. Don DeLillo is able to give the baseball religious significance. The ball passes from hand to hand. Cotter Martin’s father doesn’t see its magic the way his son does, so he sells the ball because he knows it will fetch a good price. The ball passes from hand to hand and ends up in a baseball museum. The idea is that this thing that was of magical significance in the old world becomes merely a divertissement in the new, something that you would go to a museum to see. It’s no longer a living tradition, but something that’s peered at through glass. That’s how DeLillo sees our world. The latter part of the 20th century and the 21st century are hangovers from the old world. We look at things from that time, but we don’t experience them anymore. That leads to the decay in the novel—because if you’re not living the tradition, then the tradition itself falls apart. There’s a theme of waste and garbage that runs through the novel. One of the main characters, Nick Shea, works in waste management and recyclables. He thinks to himself, ‘How can we take what is wasted and ruined and destroyed, and recycle it into something new?’ And you get some really funny, interesting riffs on this idea. For instance, halfway through the novel, they go into a condom museum. Your sexual life is something you should be living, it’s not something to look at in a museum, but life has become stilted, something for the museum or the landfill—which is another place where our old lived experiences end up. Yes. He goes from the very beginning of the Cold War, right up until the period in which he’s writing, the 1990s. He dramatizes various things. In the prologue, J. Edgar Hoover is sitting watching the ball game when he’s told by his agents that the Russians have started their testing of nuclear bombs. As with Pynchon, it’s one of those moments when there’s a little throwaway line that you then have to go and find out more about. You can spend a long time investigating the 1951 Russian tests of nuclear weapons that were a response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Up until that point, it wasn’t clear that the Russians would respond militarily with their own nuclear weapons. So this is the moment that the Cold War begins. There’s this mixing of history and art and different fields coming together in the novel. “The Triumph of Death”, which the prologue is named for, is a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It’s of masses of skeletons doing all sorts of things, one of those wonderful, Bruegel paintings where you can go into minute details for hours and hours—very much like a DeLillo novel. But it’s not the real painting, it’s a reproduction. Someone has taken a magazine print of Bruegel’s painting, ripped it up into pieces and flung it out over the baseball field. J. Edgar Hoover is very excited to be at the ball game, and as he walks around after the ‘shot heard around the world’, he notices pieces of the painting all over the place and it gives him joy. He thinks, ‘Oh, I love that painting. I love the skeletons. I love that they’re killing everyone.’ Hoover is a war maniac in the novel. He wants a world governed by the bomb and he associates “The Triumph of Death” with the knowledge that the Russians are going ahead with their atomic project and the US can retaliate. That’s the world we’re in now, a world governed by the bomb, governed by a blind might that is quite happy to destroy everything. We also get moments where we’re in the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s. That’s another big theme that runs through it. Sometimes you’re reading the novel and there will be a tiny detail like a minor character on the subway and they’re holding on to the rail with plastic gloves on. You’re not told why, but the reason is AIDS. Everyone’s wearing latex to protect themselves from the AIDS epidemic. There are two characters in the novel, Sister Edgar and Sister Grace, who go into slum areas. There’s one called the Wall, and it’s the epitome of the degradation and decay of the society in which they live. So many people have AIDS. AIDS is used in the novel as a symptom of a larger malaise. That’s quite problematic to think about now, but remember DeLillo was writing in 1997, so it was a much more contemporary epidemic to him."