Underworld

...Now he is being called one of the immortals...

...Rather, they see the pretense to faith as having a genuine dedication all its own...

...DeLillo, so good at explaining the world, goes on to explain Underworld and the way he wants it to be read, manipulating the reader from behind Sister Edgar's habit...

...She is called Edgar for no reason other than that the name makes her the symbolic "sister" to J. Edgar Hoover...

...It is as if DeLillo is saying to the reader, "Everything is connected in the end-watch me make the connections better than anybody, and leap into the ranks of the great novelists...

...In his latest novel, Underworld, DeLillo measures the effects of the long nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union...

...For the writer, DeLillo remarked recently, the solitary daily work of crafting fiction can be "a kind of religious fanaticism, with elements of obsession, superstition, and awe...

...But the novel gets away from the author, and it does so, in part, because he plays fast and loose with the ideas about religion that he has humanized more successfully in earlier books...

...However, whereas the nuns in White Noise appeared as walk-ons in a satire, Sister Edgar is a character in a realistic novel...

...Everything feels near at hand, breaking upon her, sadness and loss and glory and an old mother's bleak pity and a force at some deep level of lament that makes her feel inseparable from the shakers and the mourners...

...Gray's editor asks him...

...The "underworld," it is clear, is also the shared past which shapes each of us...

...Branch is depicted as a solitary figure "in the great sheltering nave of the Agency...

...DeLillo is making a social point through this development, even suggesting the arc of his own writing over the past two decades...

...He is a mystic of the facts...

...Whereas they frankly introduced themselves as symbols, DeLillo wants us to take this walking symbol as a complicated human being...

...Whereas so many contemporary writers dramatize a lack of meaning or a hunger for meaning, DeLillo sees a superabundance of meaning, and sees the artist's task-the human task-as that of identifying the competing meanings and figuring out how they fit together...

...As Gray sees it, a serious writer is like a terrorist or a religious fanatic in his need to assert his truth against a hostile or indifferent society...

...Monks who do not speak...

...Who do we take seriously...

...She has photographed saints' days in Spain, the Day of the Virgin in Mexico City, the Day of Blood in Tehran...

...But they see nothing false in this...

...Lillo is taking you somewhere major, even if you don't know where or how...

...after the Giants win the pennant on Bobby Thomson's "shot heard round the world," a white businessman and a black teen-ager grapple for the home-run ball...

...I need these people to believe for me," Britta tells Bill Gray...

...Although her religious order has gone modern, she still wears "the old things with the arcane names, the wimple, cincture, and guimpe"-again, for no reason other than to represent "the old rugged faith," the ideological twin to cold-war paranoia...

...But his exertions get in the way of the realistic materials he is using to build his book...

...For this reader, the Catholic imprint in DeLillo's work is best discerned in the mystic wonder for the things of the world he expresses in his prose...

...A scene in White Noise suggests that it is the pretense of faith, not faith itself, that is the key to understanding the continuing power of religion in the modern world...

...His last few novels directly address the role of faith in contemporary life...

...As DeLillo explained in connection with Libra (1988), about the Kennedy assassination: "The novelist can try to leap across the barrier of fact, and the reader is willing to take that leap with him as long as there's a sort of redemptive truth waiting on the other side, a sense that we've arrived at a resolution...

...Paul Elie is a regular contributor to Commonweal.lie is a regular contributor to Commonweal...

...Skeptical at first, Sister Edgar comes to feel as if she has seen the miracle, too...

...Moonman's art of "wildstyle" personal expression, which mirrored the belligerence of the cold war, is now an art of public consolation...

...A crowd has gathered, and they believe they have seen a miracle: a vision of a murdered girl flashing on a billboard...

...Standing apart from the modern crowd is the reclusive writer Bill Gray, who likens his own shyness to "God's famous reluctance to appear...

...They exist in the pattern the author has self-consciously elaborated...

...Fiction requires a kind of belief from the reader and offers a kind of consolation...

...This removes a hesitation that a writer might otherwise feel when he's approaching important subjects, eternal subjects...

...No less than the German nuns in White Noise, Sister Edgar is a surrogate believer, whose visible presence and apparent faith are meant to reassure the faint of heart and keep the planet from going "cold...

...However, they don't possess real faith, they only pretend to...

...It helps to explain why religion is still so strong a force in our supposedly secular society, and why so many people nominally against religion have failed to eradicate it the way they have claimed they would for centuries now...

...For about 750 pages, the reader follows the ball-irradiated with the power of the past-as it shows up in the hands of various characters...

...Underworld also dramatizes the idea that life during the cold war, life under the constant threat of universal annihilation, engendered a world-spirit in which all people participate by virtue of their common dilemma...

...In the end, the reader-at least this reader-feels the lack not only of the redemptive truth DeLillo's art has promised, but of interesting characters, a strong story, a whole and radiant design: all the homely things of fiction by which the novelist elicits the reader's belief, the writer being, in the end, not a priest or a mystic or a fanatic, but only a novelist...

...It too entails a serious life of poverty, chastity, and obedience...

...DeLillo's own prose style and organizational intelligence are so strong that the characters seem like themes with bodies and surnames...

...For a Catholic, nothing is too important to discuss or think about, because he's raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and that if he doesn't live his life in a certain way this death is simply an introduction to an eternity of pain...

...After giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation-in a scene that is a kind of medieval tableau rendered in staccato, end-of-the-century English-Gladney takes him to "a place with a neon cross over the entrance...

...No one as far as I know has called DeLillo a religious writer...

...Nuns in black...

...This is the supernatural underside of the cold war," one character remarks...

...For example, Moonman, a master subway graffiti artist from the 1970s, dedicates himself, in the 1990s, to painting a tableau of "angels"-visages of children murdered in the neighborhood- on a bombed-out building in the South Bronx...

...Dressing her up in the old garb also makes it possible-crucially-for DeLillo to have strangers recognize Edgar as a nun at the end of the book...

...At the same time, in a series of long, ambitious set pieces, the novel dramatizes different aspects of the cold-war-era "underworld": arms stockpiling in the Southwest, avant-garde art and film in SoHo, subway graffiti in the South Bronx...

...In particular, he has dramatized the notion that skeptical moderns look with a kind of gratitude to religious people, who serve as surrogate believers, keeping open the possibility of belief for those who themselves cannot believe...

...They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely...

...But the works and pomps of popular culture and its attractive diversions cannot allay the more primordial fear of death, so Gladney has to commit a murder to banish it...

...None of the characters in these episodes is all that interesting or memorable...

...Edgar is the character who must bear the heaviest burden of symbolism in the novel...

...For 600 pages you feel DeBook discussed in this essay Underworld Don Del.illo Scibner, $27.50, 827 pp...

...Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us...

...As Mark Feeney pointed out in Commonweal (August 9,1991), "In all DeLillo's books an almost medieval sense of immanence collides with a clinical delight in the amassing of data...

...I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood," he remarked in 1991...

...Seeing the nun nearby, they spontaneously embrace her...

...Wild-eyed men in caves...

...Still, they never really live on the page...

...Everything is connected in the end, yes, but the connections don't emerge from the world we live in or the one depicted in the novel...

...The fictional machinery creaks and groans: long sentences, stretched metaphors, hushed incantation, all straining for significance...

...In the New York Times Book Review, Martin Amis, ducking the question about the new book, put DeLillo up where serious readers have placed him for years...

...Whereas in classical drama the deus ex machina was flown in from above, in Underworld the divine contraption that will save the day is brought in from below...

...I cling to believers...

...The trick of fiction, I think, is to make a complex premeditated plan seem surprising and inevitable, to find a pattern on the page that somehow resembles the patterns in the world outside the window or those inside our heads...

...So it is that Underworld, DeLillo's most exhaustive novel and in many ways his most hopeful, is also the one that offers the least consolation...

...Mao II (1991) is a kind of skeleton key to DeLillo's work in which the art of fiction-making becomes a kind of religion itself...

...It is headquarters of a group of German nuns in black habits and heavy shoes...

...DeLillo also has described the nature of fiction in religious terms...

...While Underworld may or may not be a great novel," Amis wrote, "there is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great novelist...

...Rather, the material is organized thematically, with DeLillo relentlessly making the different episodes reprise one another and then piling them up, as in a landfill, or in memory...

...In Mao II, the photographer Britta Nilsson has traveled the world...

...In Underworld, though, the plan is out in the open...

...We are left to believe...

...In his recent novels, partly as a way to capture that sense of the superabundance of meaning, perhaps, DeLillo has described seemingly mundane aspects of contemporary culture in religious terms...

...There is much here that is holy," he cryptically reflects, "an aberration in the heartland of the real...

...Making Sister Edgar see a miracle, DeLillo wants the reader, as it were, to see a miracle as well...

...Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith...

...She believes, so we are to believe with her...

...At the climax of the novel, Jack Gladney shoots and wounds a drug addict named Willie Mink...

...What's more, we are asked to identify with Sister Edgar at the climax of the novel...

...All through the game, J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason, and Frank Sinatra banter back and forth...

...Miracles and visions...

...The narrative rewinds from the present to the 1950s' romance between Nick Shay (now a "waste analyst" who oversees landfills) and housewife Klara Sax (now a conceptual artist who paints decommissioned bombers...

...Nevertheless, religious language, themes, and imagery are thick on the ground in his work...

...What follows is a kind of "deep inward tunneling" into the seemingly random associations of American culture in search of the American soul...

...But it doesn't work...

...The protagonist of White Noise (1984), Jack Gladney, is the chairman of a college department of Hitler studies...

...The nuns are DeLillo's surrogate believers, keeping faith on behalf of the human race...

...DeLillo's new novel, Underworld, is the best novel you'll have trouble remembering...

...After 800 pages, it is as if DeLillo needs some kind of miracle to bring the novel to a satisfactory end...

...We learn a great deal about them as DeLillo takes us "inside the human works, down to dreams and routine rambling thoughts," in the way of James Joyce...

...Hell is when no one believes...

...This need for surrogate believers is apparently a key idea for DeLillo, for he develops it further in Mao II and Underworld...

...The novel's action flows away from its remarkable prologue, set during the 1951 playoff game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants...

...He insists that the cold war, surely the most metaphysical of political confrontations, called forth a parallel "underworld" culture of quasireligious ritual and self-expression...

...His religion, so to speak, is not conspiracy theorizing but the sifting and ordering of all the data about the assassination...

...To do this, the novelist, like the terrorist, must in some ways conceal his plan...

...Many, everywhere...

...To tell the truth, in Underworld there isn't much of a story...

...Plan and pattern are the whole point of the book...

...In Libra, the stand-in for the novelist is Nicholas Branch, who is writing a history of the assassination for the CIA twenty-five years after Kennedy's death...

...Without them, the planet goes cold...

...For example, in DeLillo's work the suburban supermarket, with its profusion of brightly packaged and test-marketed goods, is not just a wasteland of fruitless diversions, but is a world of signs which, if we can decipher it, can tell us who we are...

...In the modern world, however, the writer has yielded his cultural power to headline-catching terrorists, and now he envies them their influence...

...Let me explain in DeLillo's own terms...

...The head nun explains: As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe...

...He is a kind of priest of the religion of popular culture, "the cults of the famous and the dead...

...DeLillo was born in 1936, grew up in the Bronx, and went to Cardinal Hayes High School and Fordham there...

...Now she photographs only writers, the implication being that writers are the next best thing to true believers-surrogate believers for rational and educated people in the West, making art of the religious impulses we don't dare act on in our own lives...

...DeLillo's surrogate believers Paul Elie The reviewers of Don DeLillo's eleven novels have called him many things: a "systems novelist," the chief shaman of the "paranoid school of American fiction," a cultural critic who works in the form of the novel...

...Where DeLillo seems to want us to share his awe in the face of contemporary life, we are distracted by his striving to create an awesome work...

...Their mission is "to embody old things...

...In the past, DeLillo has countered this by devising strong, relentless plots...

...As DeLillo finds religious impulses behind the appearances of contemporary life, he depicts religion itself as a game of appearances...

...Not so this time...

...In the neighborhood, Moonman meets Shay's old grammar-school teacher, Sister Edgar, who now performs works of mercy on the streets...

...This, I think, is a shrewd and uncanny insight into the way we live now...

...In interviews he regularly brings up his old-school Italian Catholic background...

...And it goes a long way toward explaining the psychology of the legions of lapsed Catholics who no longer believe but remain emotionally bound to it...

...Everything," we are told, "is connected in the end...