Stalking the Elusive Zeitgeist
DOWNING, BEN
Stalking the Elusive Zeitgeist Underworld By Don DeLillo Scribner. 832 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by Ben Downing Managing editor, "Parnassus Verisimilitude has never been one of Don DeLillo's...
...Sol am left with the sad bewilderment caused by watching a fine writer squander his talent...
...another sees Brueghel's Triumph of Death...
...When not chronicling the tepid activities of these folks, it potters among a peripheral host of others...
...It is telling that the word "old" appears on virtually every page, because the book is almost geriatrically enervated...
...But in the early 1950s, we gradually learn, the Shay family imploded in a Bronx blaze of gambling, abduction, adultery, and homicide...
...A bit like Marguerite Yourcenar's A Coin in Nine Hands, this novel ostensibly falls into place surrounding a much-swapped totem: the baseball that Bobby Thomson whacked into the stands to end the famous Giants vs...
...It is clear that Clio reigns as presiding muse here: DeLillo's aim, if I grasp it, is to lay bare the complex interaction of capital...
...Beyond pondering the True Meaning of the Bomb, razzing Hoover (no hard target), and alluding to the Cuban Missile Crisis (and, of course, the Martyrdom of St...
...Ironically, though, his dogged attempts to show how in touch he is only prove the opposite...
...As with Mao II, the novel begins in a New York baseball stadium (crowds being DeLillo's latest pet horror...
...The man has no variety in pitch...
...There are driveby murders caught on video, two utterly gratuitous herorn-ingestion scenes, and, to close the novel, a sort of cyberspace epiphany that's too ridiculous for words...
...But the culture has caught up with him...
...They connect with each other—in both the emotional and the narrative senses—hardly at all...
...All seem slathered with the same paralyzing tar...
...But here the low-key urgency feels unfocused, strained, half-hearted, and monotonous...
...If so, it is made at the most bankrupting expense imaginable...
...and the bronze tower that encases the office," and takes crepuscular strolls with his wife along the drainage canal...
...DeLillo seems determined to stay au courant...
...underhistory" and edgy patter about the "supernatural underside of the arms race...
...His fixation on systems—on the halfsoothing, half-sinister "caress of linked grids," as Underworld would have it—is now a weary commonplace...
...But it wasn't...
...it has learned to gaze into its own pierced navel with the same quizzical amazement that DeLillo long purveyed...
...Reviewed by Ben Downing Managing editor, "Parnassus Verisimilitude has never been one of Don DeLillo's particular aspirations...
...We're treated to apothegms like "waste is the...
...As for mounting tension, you couldn't spark a refrigerator bulb on the voltage this thing gives off...
...They tend to run afoul of vague, improbable coteries, and they all ruminate in Delilloese, akind of lyrically anxious Esperanto composed of equal parts Joyce, Chandler and technoblather...
...mark the inner nature of the age," for instance— that appear to explain its method or purpose...
...The author's patent dialogue—rife with non sequiturs, incompletions, solecisms—in which characters tend to address each other in the third person, rings hollow and stilted this time around...
...Even by DeLillo's rather cardboard standards the characters are scarcely distinguishable: a bunch of nuns, some graffiti artists, Lenny Bruce, an elderly couple vacationing in San Francisco...
...Although less droll, The Names fascinated with its Kodachrome locations (Greece, the Middle East, India), bizarre yet gripping premise (a murderous alphabet cult), and almost cabalistic reverence for the enigmas of language...
...as their author has put it...
...For all its rumblings about nukes, this is his least persuasively apocalyptic novel to date...
...Underworld's, thin tissue of mannerisms, however, succeeds only in being inadequately plausible or vivid...
...Is this diffuseness the point...
...If the above makes Underworld sound exciting, for the first long chapter it actually is...
...Equally important, they were engrossing, well-wrought fictions...
...Certainly there are phrases— "those distracted events that...
...His characters are near-ciphers...
...And it tosses off loads of fat, juicy clues as to the significance of its title: One character watches a lost Eisenstein film called Underworld...
...The opening gambit is irresistible: Toots Shor, Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, and J. Edgar Hoover are getting raucously sozzled together at the celebrated pennant game, when Hoover receives word that the Soviets have successfully tested an atomic weapon...
...History with those tiny, plural, separate lives that make it up—a subterranean reality, not sur- but "underreal," in the book's phrase...
...It makes a few feeble bids for a laugh, and, appealing to our presumptive jadedness, many more for a snicker or a smirk...
...his tone is founded on this paradox...
...He took a high-tech, hallucinatory, wryly Orwellian slant on what we had become and where we were going...
...Underworld, alas, simply is not very funny...
...What's remarkable is that the ruse sometimes works...
...Just as fruitlessly obsessed over are our hippest new pathologies...
...In lovingly burnished prose they managed to capture how it feels to "live in the particular skin of the late 20th century...
...Style is the one eminence loyal to DeLillo...
...In these books DeLillo's grim garrulity cohered around a center that, against the modern odds, could hold...
...In fact, it often seems that his whole apparatus is an elaborate stalking-horse for two real quarries: the Zeitgeist and the perfect phrase...
...My three favorites among DeLillo's books are Great Jones Street, The Names and White Noise...
...Dodgers game of October 3, 1951, that decided the National League pennant race...
...The usual DeLillo fetishes—airports, deserts, toxicity, "the data swarm"—get sedulously fingered, but no juju can be coaxed from them...
...They take courses like Sports Broadcasting and Mexican Geography, or else teach in Hitler Studies Departments...
...The ball is bought and resold throughout the book, tenuously linking many of its characters, including the latest owner, one Nick Shay (whose name suggests a slight mutation from Bill Gray, the protagonist of Mao II ). Today, Nick lives a wary corporate life as a toxic waste manager in Phoenix...
...Tricks that have worked in the past now fizzle...
...Once a writer who was attuned to our pulses and catarrhs, DeLillo could discern, perhaps better than any other writer, certain odd, possibly ominous (I'm trying to avoid saying "postmodern") developments in American life...
...It fails to chill because its interminable abracadabra fails to summon the Spirit of the Age...
...DeLillo has long sounded at once anesthetized and panicky, autistic yet verbose...
...The book seems conceived as a kind of shattered Cold War mosaic of American life, a clutch of mutually amplifying vignettes...
...Nor, despite some gesturing toward them, does he apprehend our Big Fears and Concerns...
...Every inch of prosein Underworld has manifestly been whispered aloud and tested against the ear, each phoneme coddled like a first-born...
...In short, the misbegotten denizens of Underworld are two-dimensional semizombies who think as DeLillo thinks and talk as DeLillo characters have always talked, only less amusingly...
...The chapter was published by Harper's a few years ago as "Pafko at the Wall...
...Not so for Underworld...
...If you have already read it, skip the book, because it plunges next into a Stygian torpor and never revives...
...Regardless of how many prize locutions still come his way, though, the moment's ghost has given him up...
...And just as engaging are some of DeLillo's sentences, which can exhibit a special relentless bravura: "Men passing in and out of toilets, men zipping their flies as they turn from the trough and other men approaching the long receptacle, thinking where they want to stand and next to whom and not next to whom, and the old ballpark's reek and mold are consolidated here, generational tides of beer and shit and cigarettes and peanut shells and disinfectants and pisses in the untold millions, and they are thinking in the ordinary way that helps a person glide through life, thinking thoughts unconnected to events, the dusty hum of who you are, men shouldering through the traffic in the men's room as the game goes on, the coming and going, the lifting out of dicks and the meditative pissing...
...For 750 additional pages this behemoth moves haphazardly around the country and the decades as it maunders in and out of the Shays' lives and those of the people embroiled with them...
...JFK, a third "shot heard round the world" after Emerson's and Bobby Thomson's), DeLillo never really sinks his teeth into the Cold War any more than into the Shay family...
...Characters like Jack Gladney in White Noise and the delightfully monikered rock-star-on-the-skids Bucky Wunderlick in Great Jones Street were uniquely appealing in their comic dread...
...He clings to "a sense of order and command reinforced by the office...
...If this novel had been written by a hack, I would be tempted maliciously to dub it "Undercooked" or "Blunderworld," and to draw snide analogies with Waterworld...
...It is his inability to auscultate the body national that is most dismaying...
...DeLillo novels have been known to survive on little plot, but they have done so largely on the strength of their black humor...
Vol. 80 • September 1997 • No. 15
