Don DeLillo's Underworld

...The first page tells us, "Longing on a large scale is what makes his126 DISSENT / Winter 1998 tory...

...He says maybe one is the mystical twin of the other...

...they are all the same riff...

...On the level of the sentence, it pulls off eight hundred pages of successful and often brilliant linguistic moves...

...Almost any line could be spoken by any character on any page...

...The footage seemed to advance some argument about the nature of film itself...

...Marvin Lundy, a baseball memorabilist, explaining the interconnectedness of all reality under the organizing discipline of nuclear weapons: DISSENT / Winter 1998 125 "Which the whole thing is interesting because when they make an atomic bomb, listen to this, they make the radioactive core the exact same size as a baseball...

...His politics never corresponded to left-wing orthodoxy and eventually swung far to the right...

...Here is Klara watching the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination at an outré 1970s party: . . . it was glary and artless and completely steeped in being what it was, in being film...

...How the intersecting systems help pull us apart, leaving us vague, drained, docile, soft in our inner discourse, willing to be shaped, to be overwhelmed—easy retreats, half beliefs...

...waste...

...She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence...

...The answer, I think, is that Dos Passos shows us the action of history on individuals...

...So Underworld's chief flaw is explained by its central theme...

...Underworld gives us history that has subdued longing until its murmurs are barely audible...

...Another Edgar, Hoover, at the Polo Grounds on the day of Bobby Thomson's homer, which was also the day that the world learned of the Soviet atomic bomb, staring contentedly at the tormented creatures in a magazine reproduction of Bruegel's The Triumph of Death...

...There is a woman who has left her hus124 DISSENT / Winter 1998 band to become a painter, but Klara Sax is the novel's least successful character, and Part 4 ("Cocksucker Blues: Summer 1974"), which she dominates, will defeat some readers at the halfway mark of a work that reserves great pleasures for its later sections...

...Dos Passos's imaginary people are not individuals on a heroic scale in the manner of Tolstoy...

...I tell Viktor there is a curious connection between weapons and waste...

...Klara's uncanny perception of the Zapruder film could have been Matt Shay's, or j. Edgar Hoover's...

...has few of the linguistic and imaginative advantages of Underworld...

...The progress of the car down Elm Street, the movement of the film through the camera body, some sharable darkness—this was a death that seemed to rise from the streamy debris of the deep mind, it came from some night of the mind, there was some trick of film emulsion that showed the ghost of consciousness...

...j OHN DOS PASSOS'S U.S.A...

...We follow his characters—the vagabond Wobbly, the glib public-relations executive, the frigid interior decorator, the naive young radical, the reckless inventor—as they are consumed by the history of their times...

...She thought to wonder if this home movie was some crude living likeness of the mind's own technology, the sort of death plot that runs in the mind, because it seemed so familiar, the footage did—it seemed a thing we might see, not see but know, a model of the nights when we are intimate with our own dying...

...There is a gunshot in a basement room, but as DeLillo writes at one point, "It was a gesture without a history," no cause, little effect...

...Nick, the waste-disposal executive, musing on the nature of garbage: "Every bad smell is about us...

...The best-known inventions —stream-of-consciousness "Camera Eyes," and "Newsreel" pastiches of headlines, song lyrics, slogans, anonymous quotations— take up a small fraction of the three long volumes...

...death—not quiet individual perishings, but mass destruction on a nuclear or hellish scale that renders individual life meaningless...

...At seventeen Nick has an affair with Klara, the wife of Matt's chess tutor...

...Nonetheless, his belief that history is a "single narrative sweep" concentrates U.S.A...

...There is nothing in Underworld comparable to the Sacco and Vanzetti passages in The Big Money...

...Its central characters have perceptions without lives, are largely unknowable and leave you cold...

...T0 LET the novel work on you as intensely as it can, you have to drop narrative expectations and, in effect, ignore what appear to be its main characters and stories...

...But Nick could have spelled this out himself...

...In the same way that the counterculture took on the cold war's paranoia and desire for total explanations, his novels (Underworld no less than Mao II, Libra, White Noise, or the earlier ones) are irresistibly drawn back into the system, the web of technology, the suspicion of interconnectedness, the vision of control without meaning, to which Underworld adds the nuclear fall from innocence...

...Dos Passos doesn't fictionalize his historical characters because he doesn't need to, because the actual lives of Woodrow Wilson and Randolph Bourne in the frame of an objective history give his narrative its thrust and meaning...

...But it's impossible for me to contemplate reading Underworld again...

...Most sentient people today no longer believe that history can be understood objectively, that individual lives follow a coherent course with a bold and simple moral outline, that justice matters to art...

...Then why is it so compelling...

...Or so she thought to wonder...

...The riffs are attributed to someone or other but they all flow from the same slanted intelligence...

...The summing-up is left to a Russian entrepreneur named Viktor, who contracts with Nick to dispose of contaminated waste through underground nuclear explosions at the original Kazakh test site...

...And in this case," I say...

...And his prelapsarian Bronx of 1951-1952, remembered in nostalgic snatches of youthful slang, has a good deal more significance for the writer than for his readers...

...We make our way through the world and come upon a scene that is medieval-modern, a city of high-rise garbage, the hell reek of every perishable object ever thrown together, and it seems like something we've been carrying all our lives...

...By contrast, DeLillo has no cause...

...Dos Passos was a radical for the first half DISSENT / Winter 1998 127 of his life, but he was more at home in the aesthetic twenties than the militant thirties...

...History in U.S.A...

...Underworld proposes that the cold war produced cultural death and attenuated lives lived in its shadow...

...This gives the trilogy a cumulative power that climaxes in the indictment of warcrazed America at the end of 1919 and in the savage portrait of 1920s capitalism throughout The Big Money...

...DELILLO'S DEATH-haunted imagination is a strenuous mix of the Catholic Church and the 1960s...

...What we excrete comes back to consume us...

...There is no escape —except in language...

...The pathos is in their acquiescence, and in the sense of wasted longings...

...Underworld doesn't live between such riffs but in them, and there are too many to be named, mesmerizing prose poems, little imaginative essays—it would be difficult to overstate their inventiveness, their linguistic exuberance, or the intricacy of their design...

...It fails the most basic tests of narrative...

...It has no forward drive, or backward drive...

...Four decades of waste later, on the novel's penultimate page, Sister Edgar, wired into cyberspace, clicks on the H-bomb home page and "begins to sense the byshadows that stretch from the awe of a central event...

...Sister Edgar, a latex-gloved "cold war nun," obsessed with germ warfare and "the faith that replaces God with radioactivity" as she makes her rounds through disease and death in the lower circles of the Bronx...

...he is sent to Jesuit reform school, emerges into the sixties, moves to Phoenix, becomes an executive of a waste-disposal corporation, marries, fathers, cheats, is cheated on, feels isolated, and longs for "the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself...

...The Bomb...

...into an exceptionally strong moral response...

...Novelists, like historians, need points of demarcation: DeLillo's is October 3, 1951...

...The sweep of modern history, the cast of imaginary and real people, the Bronx and southwestern desert and Kazakhstan, the phenomenology of everyday objects, are reducible to "a certain furtive sameness...

...in that same year, 1952, Nick commits an act of unintended violence...

...GEORGE PACKER'S novel Central Square will be published by Graywolf in the fall...

...Forty years of American life and essentially nothing changes...

...The Bobby Thomson homer, coinciding with the Soviet nuclear test, was "the last time people spontaneously went out of their houses for something...

...Neither he nor any of the other imaginary characters can escape history, but there is clarity and coherence in the process of their dissolution...

...The culture and its loaded words...

...There was no context for the line except the one that Lenny took with him everywhere...

...Every page is of the deepest interest, and yet the novel as a whole is boring...

...It carried a kind of inner life, something unconnected to the things we call phenomena...

...In conventional narrative terms, Underworld is about the fate of the baseball that Bobby Thomson famously hit out of the Polo Grounds to win the pennant for the Giants over the Dodgers in 1951...

...Its context is DeLillo's total and static vision of the cold war...

...Since readers bring an inescapably linear hope to narrative, any novelist who starts with the idea that historical coherence was lost in the nuclear age will pay a high price...

...And the bulk of the work— interposed lives of a dozen imaginary men and women from the turn of the century to the stock market crash—is narrated in a deliberately flat, external style that sticks to the quality of the characters' ordinary speech...

...Where Underworld asserts our moral condition in the cold war, U.S.A...

...And it is about Nick Shay, the man who decades later ends up with the ball, and about his brother Matt: Bronx sons of a small-time bookie who disappeared when they were young...

...In our case, in our age...

...On the level of structure, it travels through half a century in roughly reverse chronology and through a symphony of motifs whose interconnections demand another reading, and another...

...His great theme is the rise of American power and the loss of its democratic innocence...

...Page after page the motifs return in every conceivable variation...

...A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation...

...The only Americans able to withstand the pressure of popular culture, war hysteria, and feverish moneymaking are a few biographied characters like Robert LaFollette and the Wright Brothers...

...Its publisher presents the novel as a sort of love story between Nick Shay and Klara Sax: "He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room...

...Any attempt to summarize Underworld will distort it, favorably and unfavorably, out of recognition...

...And this suggests something unavoidable in the relationship between DeLillo's two great subjects, fiction and history...

...U.S.A...

...The individual is left out...

...The same is true of Underworld...

...The scene is funny and virtuosic, but like everything else in Underworld it's a fragment floating in a literary consciousness that, without a single narrative sweep, has to assemble ten thousand wisps of disinformation...

...A brilliantly imagined Lenny Bruce taking his nightclub act across America the week of the Cuban missile crisis and freezing audiences with the oneliner: "We're all gonna die...

...trilogy provides a reading experience that reverses Underworld's: it seems as if it ought to be boring but it isn't...

...All those decades, he says, when we thought about weapons all the time and never thought about the dark multiplying byproduct...

...The statement sounds right and good, and yet it leaves out something crucial, the very thing that's missing from Underworld...

...unfolds as Nick Shay wants it to in Underworld: "Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood—read the speeches of Mussolini—at least we've known the thing together...

...Its incidents are random and without consequences...

...The biographies of famous Americans are, unlike DeLillo's real-life characters, historically accurate...

...Because waste is the secret history, the underhistory, the way archaeologists dig out the history of early cultures, every sort of bone heap and broken tool, literally from under the ground...

...It may be true that the last half century has flattened out life and made the cold war "the one constant thing," but if so it's disastrous for the novelist...

...The action is in the eccentric rightness of the language, in image patterns, in recurring themes...

...I found that the best state of mind for reading Underworld was when it had begun to put me to sleep, submerged in that halfwaking state where words have dream-associations with a suggestive power to stir obscure emotions and persuade you to accept claims about reality that you might resist if alert...

...He says waste is the devil twin...

...Nick's distant mystery never lifts, and perhaps DeLillo chose to tell his story approximately backward, from 1992 to 1951, because the story itself—the odyssey of the baseball, the Bronx family, the shooting, the affairs, Nick and Klara's brief reunion in the desertexists, strange to say, independent of the novel's real concerns: so a narrative reversal disguises the absence of plot and creates suspense about that echoed gunshot, which, it turns out, explains nothing...

...He likes this idea...

...The decay of these beliefs is liberating for the imagination, so that DeLillo's J. Edgar Hoover can appear in a leather mask at Truman Capote's Black-and-White ball and indulge a remote erotic thrill...

...Almost by accident they fall into and are swept along with the main historical currents of their times—strikes, war, Hollywood, advertising, communism, party giving...

...Language can be a form of counterhistory," DeLillo wrote recently in the New York Times Magazine...

...They are created for their representativeness, characters suited to the early years of the twentieth century when America became a mass democracy...

...dramatizes our moral transformation in World War I. It shows how an idealistic young ambulance driver gets caught up in the cynical hedonism behind the front lines, how he turns the noble slogans of the American delegation at Versailles into a lucrative career writing ad copy for health foods...

...In this context the most revealing comparison one might draw with DeLillo is not to the most often mentioned candidates—Pynchon, Gaddis, Beckett—but to the largely forgotten chronicler of twentiethcentury America's first three decades...

...Fiction's linguistic qualities "will sooner or later state their adversarial relationship with history...

...This précis bears the scantest resemblance to the novel's real terms...

...Nick's private life is entirely asserted rather than dramatized, determined by larger concerns, which is why he doesn't change or live on the page...