The Last Page
Berman, Marshall
MY BEACH BOOK this past Summer was Don DeLillo's 1997 novel Underworld. Near Asbury Park, on a beach that was eroding by the hour, where the emergency jetty was blown away and the surf rushed...
...Telling the story of an immigrant working-class family, its life and death and its life-in-death, he joins the great tradition of American Realism...
...He is amazingly fluent in modern languagegames— academic, corporate, political, military, cybernetic and he has an acute sense of what's wrong with modern life...
...But then, all of a sudden, he throws us into a completely different kind of book, one that turns out to be a lot more compelling...
...We never meet Jimmy, hut by his absence he dominates every minute of their lives...
...But they come up in a more expansive phase of Pentagon capitalism, the "Sputnik Age," an age that scouted smart city boys and made room for them...
...But he's still a thrill to read...
...The working-class immigrant family story is America's longest-playing tragedy...
...It's about feeling and reverie and introspection and the bonds of love—you could call it a metaphysical Girls' Book...
...It's still there...
...The working-class family can collapse from failure, but also from success...
...and their sons, Nick and Matt—tough, bright, rivalrous, soulful kids...
...But he can play...
...They come from a tenement in the center of the Bronx, in the Italian neighborhood west of the Zoo...
...DeLillo's people are the Shay family...
...DeLillo's Matty and Nick evoke Death of a Salesman's Happy and Biff...
...It's a great performance, vintage DeLillo...
...Ironically, living through this tragedy is one of the things that makes America a community...
...My wife says she's never seen me cling to a new book so intensely...
...DeLillo finds new strength and depth as a writer by getting personal...
...Think Anzia Yesierska and Henry Roth, think James Farrell and Clifford Odets, think Bruce Springsteen and Maxine Hong Kingston...
...his world feels emotionally hollow, like it's been evacuated by human beings...
...It's a surprise to find him playing in this ballpark...
...His languages have no speakers...
...But Oy, such a cold heart...
...Near Asbury Park, on a beach that was eroding by the hour, where the emergency jetty was blown away and the surf rushed at us like a gang shoving outsiders off its turf, it felt just right...
...No one in this family can ever come out of mourning for "the long ghosts [who] are walking the hall . . . back in those railroad rooms at the narrow end of the night...
...And those paranoid narratives, full of secret agents and conspiracies and things that blow up in the night—those metaphysical Boys' Books—grow up already...
...I've always wanted to love DeLillo: he's so damned smart, and he comes from the Bronx...
...Personal, but also communal...
...It's a perfect beach book for a crumbling shore...
...Older kids on rented bikes, ten cents an hour, and girls riding with some of the boys, sitting sideways on the crossbar, and the boys riding into the gushing water, making everybody happy...
...Underworld helps expand the house we live in...
...Here Nick daydreams old summer nights: All movement toward the air, heads sticking out windows, women eating peaches in darkened windows, laughing in the dark up there . . . men in undershirts down on the stoops with radios going...
...It is a childrenneighborhoodfamily story, told with more passion and emotional urgency than anything he has ever done...
...Was he killed, did he kill himself, or did he simply walk out on them...
...Underworld starts with a sixty-page set piece featuring the Giants' and Dodgers' 1951 playoff, Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra, "Jedgar" Hoover and the Soviet Bomb...
...Who would have thought DeLillo could write that...
...his wife, Rosemary, who holds the family together through years of hard times...
...MARSHALL BERMAN 144 n DISSENT / Fall 1998...
...They are Jimmy, a smalltime bookie, who goes out for cigarettes one night and is never seen again...
...The boys could succeed—get an education, achieve upward mobility, have steady jobs and houses and cars, support their mother in style—and yet, DeLillo wants us to know, their lives could still be a tragic human waste to which "Attention must be paid...
Vol. 45 • September 1998 • No. 4
