Books: 'Underworld' belongs in the Styx

Underworld sets itself some daunting tasks: to encompass the last 45 years of American culture and politics, to weave the threads of nuclear warfare, celebrity, garbage and salvage into a clear-headed statement of modern existence, and to establish itself as Don DeLillo's magnum opus. In all but the last, it does an estimable and often devastating job of piecing together disparate elements of a scope wider than most modern authors would dare take on. But DeLillo's obsession with making his book relevant exacerbates to heretofore unseen extents the trouble when an author knows exactly what he's doing. Underworld is so centrally flawed that I'm tempted to see its faults as DeLillo's ultimate statement, not on modern America, but on the futility of the monumental task of critiquing it.

DeLillo has been writing since the early '70s, when Americana first established his preoccupation with the expansive realms of high society and politics. Often his furious efforts at thematic containment foiled the pinpoint accuracy of individual scenes, as he tried to slide events, words, and even entire people into his frameworks. But with 1985's White Noise, he produced a terrifyingly uncommon view of the decay of everyday life, the eradication of the gap between the real and the simulated, and most prophetically, the paradox of psychoactive drugs. The topics served the characters, not the other way around, and for 300 horrific pages he spun modern legends of toxic clouds, world records, and the creeping insanity of Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler studies. Whether through practice or instinct, DeLillo wrote a book that could resonate with almost anyone.

Now comes Underworld, and DeLillo has even more weighing on his mind. Beginning with the 1951 Giants-Dodgers playoff game and a Soviet nuclear detonation, he follows the fate of baseball, and of vagabond Nick Shay. His story alternates with dozens of others, most notably those of Nick's shell-shocked brother Matt, and the reticent Klara Sax, one of the few characters who makes her way into the reaches of public life--and pays the price for it. In between are anecdotes of the "figures," DeLillo's appropriations of celebrities for his own symbolic purposes. Among them are two people presented as the polarized mascots of our era, Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover. As the novel traces backwards from 1992 to 1951, the two wage an unspoken, unconsummated war between expressive, unyielding paranoia and, well, unexpressive, unyielding paranoia. Only in the epilogue do we reach the present day, with a tentative, if harrowing, reconciliation. The novel throws off sparks of incidental stories and digressions in its nearly opaque narrative, and the overall effect is less that of a story than of an encyclopedia: open it to any page and see one more cryptic, immaculate fragment of an 827-page series of shuffled Burmashave billboards.

But in his willful effort to capture everything, rabidly checking every exit to make sure none of his subjects escape, DeLillo is all too willing to step on his characters. Nick is no more than DeLillo's tabula rasa on which to imprint culture, and the other characters soon start to blend together because they all share the same concerns--DeLillo's. Whether discussing the statistics of a New York blackout, the nostalgia of what may or may not be that baseball, or Landsat photographs, their attitudes, words, and phrasings are those of the narrative, driving the book towards thematic resolution by any means necessary. The effect is often dazzling: the false color Landsat photographs "reveal a secondary beauty in the world, ordinarily unseen, some hallucinatory fuse of exactitude and rapture. Every thermal burst of color was a complex emotion he could not locate or name." But often it is only numbing: characters are tossed aside as soon as they've said their force-fed lines, plot-points discarded the moment they run out of telling implications. By page 600 you can see DeLillo between the envelopes of the book, frantically trying to link everything together. And link it he does, but at too great a cost. Crossing off the items on his to-do list, DeLillo disappoints the characters, brushing them aside for important statements that he feels he needs to make.

You forget about all these things when, for short or long passages, DeLillo inexplicably, undeniably, and ineffably gets it right. There's no other way to describe it. On these occasions, the narcotic power that inexorably fueled White Noise's death-obsessed drive summons up as clear a fever dream of the times in which we live as the best fiction of the last forty-five years. The first such section doesn't come until nearly 300 pages in, and there's another dry spell around page 500, but when you do hit "The Cloud of Unknowing," the third "Manx Martin" interlude, and the epilogue, DeLillo redeems his Herculean undertaking with protracted, abstracted insights that nonetheless clear the bar by feet.

William H. Gass wrote, "The contemporary American writer is in no way a part of the social and political scene. He is therefore not muzzled, for no one fears his bite; nor is he called upon to compose. Whatever work he does must proceed from a reckless inner need. The world does not beckon, nor does it greatly reward." Underworld is DeLillo railing against Gass's constraint at all costs, proclaiming his relevance on every page. In my opinion, it was doomed to failure. But the fruits of DeLillo's scrapings against our culture are entirely his own. He has created something that proclaims itself to be an epic in precisely the way that William Gaddis's The Recognitions and either of Pynchon's long works don't, by screaming to be heard by even those who don't read. But in tragic desperation, Underworld seems less significant. In DeLillo's concerted attempts to make his world our world, he can't help but expose the glaring gaps between the two.

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