Author:Don Delillo
Don Delillo is one of my very favourite writers. I read Underworld 20 years ago when it came out, but it’s power only really came through re-reading it now. Its famous opening section recreates a 1951 New York baseball match between the Giants and the Dodgers, at which a championship-winning home run is hit. Delillo’s writing is surely (David Peace fans contest) the best ever literary recreation of a sporting event – focusing not so much on the action itself as how going to, being at and experiencing the match felt to those there – who include both J Edgar Hoover and Frank Sinatra – and a boy who wrestles the match-winning ball from someone who has befriended him. Later on we find out that the same night the Soviet Union has exploded its first atomic bomb, heralding the Cold War.
From there we jump forty years to the end of the Cold War, and meet the protagonist Nick as he drives out to the desert to reconnect with a former lover Klara Sax, who is leading a huge art project painting decommissioned B-52 nuclear bombers.
It’s no surprise that Delillo was drawn in a later novel to the images of falling people from the Twin Towers on 9/11. Underworld is structured as a fall through post-war America, with sections in the eighties, seventies, sixties and fifties. Constantly we revisit the threat of armageddon – we follow a B-52 on nuclear patrol, we visit a secret facility in which Nick’s brother works testing American nuclear weapons, and sections of New York’s ghettoes already which appear post-apocalyptic. The home run-winning baseball itself appears in the lives of several characters – several of whom are obsessed with its elusive nature, and the impossibility of tracing it definitively back to the stadium and the home run.
Another real-life figure Delillo weaves into the sixties action, besides Hoover (who figures in another great set piece at a Black and White Ball society event), is Lenny Bruce. We get generous slabs of the great man’s act as re-imagined by the author, and Delillo’s musings on his thought processes, all structured around his repeated screamed response to the Cuban missile crisis: ‘We’re all gonna die!’.
The progression (or regression) that takes Nick from listening to the baseball match on his roof as a boy to a post-cold war nuclear waste disposal test is the plot, but the interest is surely in how Delillo explores the ‘underworld’ of connections between the objects, feelings and memories that bind us together. To take one example: the B-52 on patrol has ‘Long Tall Sally’ – a scantily dressed woman- as its nose art, and will end up in the desert as part of Klara’s vast art project. Piloting it is the son of the baseball memorabilia collector obsessed with the history of the baseball, and its mission is based on data gathered by Nick’s younger brother. We end up finally in the world wide web – perhaps the moment the ‘underworld’ of hidden connections went overground.
I think this is an amazing novel. It’s scope is vast, and Delillo ties together the ever-present threat of nuclear armageddon with social collapse in the New York ghettoes (there’s a great section on the subway graffiti painters of the seventies) and individually in Nick, who we find out has personally been involved in an act of extreme violence. The one person who will honestly talk about the fears of annihilation that haunt all the characters is Lenny Bruce.
Delillo is not everyone’s cup of tea. His dialogue is brilliant – capturing exactly how it can be interlocking monologues where neither is really listening and responding to the other. But there’s not much space for female characters and he needs a subject matter that matches his analytical and stark prose style. Falling Man (his 9/11 novel) didn’t match subject with style so well, this one – about the apocalypse averted – does so in spades.
It’s 830 pages, so not something to pick up casually, but I couldn’t put it down once I did. What might an English Underworld feature? Perhaps the 1966 world Cup and the endless debate over that goal that did or didn’t cross the line. I can’t help feel he would be drawn to Greenham Common in the 80s, the Vulcan bomber’s last sortie to the Falklands War, and to the chilly environs of Windscale. Further back in time he would surely make room for the Profumo affair, for Mick Jagger’s drug bust, Chris Morris, and the epic industrial struggles of the seventies. That novel – UK novelists note – remains to be written.
Length of Read:Long
Might appeal to people who enjoyed…
The Goldfinch (see earlier review), Jonathan Coe, David Peace…
One thing you’ve learned
Lenny Bruce – now there’s someone I wished I’d seen.
This is just a great book – can’t recommend it highly enough!
tt is wonderful. Dense but dextrous. Each sentence crafted, meticulous. Yet, it is overlong, and its denouement underwhelming. Ruthless editing would have made for a better book.
The best of DeLillo is, in my view, to be found in the similarly themed but more focused Libra. Underworld is not quite a masterpiece, but brilliant nonetheless.
I absolutely loved this when I read it so it’s good to hear it stands up to a second reading. I’m tempted – though last time I re read a modern novel I loved first time – Midnights Children – it seemed so much less substantial than I remembered.
I, too, read Underworld when it originally came out and was so blown away that I re-read it within a year – and I cannot think of another novel (particularly such a large one) – that has had the same effect. Your review has inspired me to revisit for a third go.
Terrific write up, Moseley.
The opening baseball sequence remains for me one of the best pieces I’ve read & is definitely worthy to be read as a standalone work.
Underworld completely absorbed me when I read upon the paperback release. My recollection is that much of it was rather mesmeric or dream like & that despite the fact it all made perfect sense, I found it nigh on impossible to convey its merits to people who asked what is was about – attempts to do so sounding hugely woolly or pretentious.
I’m glad to learn it stands up, but these days its sheer heft makes me wonder if I could stick a re – reading.
@blueboy @hoops-mccann the baseball match section was originally published separately, so I’d recommend you read that then if not gripped you can exit with grace having read a long short story.
@blue-boy curse the predictive text
@fin59 I read Libra too on its release and found it a bit heavy going. 2016 will definitely put it on the re-read list after enjoying Underworld so much.