Don DeLillo: Underworld (1997)

In Underworld, DeLillo is clearly writing in Great-American-Novel mode, pushing for a big statement about History while at the same time highlighting the insufficiency of traditional historical grand narratives. Given its massive scale and scope, multiple narrative threads and forms, and cameos by famous historical figures, Underworld might be considered a postmodern equivalent of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy. The book opens in 1951 with a masterfully crafted description of the baseball game between the Giants and Dodgers at the Polo Grounds that concluded with Bobby Thompson hitting his game winning “Shot Heard Round the World.” The book then jumps to the present, and over the next 700 pages slowly works its way back toward that momentous homerun. As history runs backwards, DeLillo fills in the lives of a large group of characters, most of whom have some connection to the homerun baseball. Covering the last half of the 20th century, the novel situates this labyrinth of individual narratives within the larger history of the Cold War. DeLillo drives home the point that the Russians tested an atomic bomb on the same day as the baseball game in 1951. References to the Cold War, from Lenny Bruce cracking jokes about the Cuban Missile Crisis to New Left protests against the Vietnam War, are essential to the sense of history that hovers over the rewinding narrative. Throughout, this geopolitical History is juxtaposed with the subterranean history of the homerun baseball’s passage through the hands of a series of owners (one character even notes that “the radioactive core [is] the exact same size as a baseball”). But written after the collapse of really existing socialism and in an era when baseball seems to have become hopelessly commercialized and mediated, Underworld concludes by doubting whether contemporary times can adequately register or even create something like history. In the final section, unambiguously titled “Das Kapital,” Nick Shay, the eventual owner of the baseball, travels to the former Soviet Union to see a demonstration by a new firm that specializes in using nuclear explosions to destroy nuclear waste. Nick grew up in a poor but vital neighborhood of the Bronx in the 1940s and 50s. His father disappeared when Nick was young, leaving him without a sense of personal history and perhaps leading to his involvement in a fatal shooting that sent him to a youth correctional center. Although the shooting - the decisive moment in his personal history - remains a mystery to Nick, he manages to reconstruct a life and history for himself, in part by adopting the world of business. Nick thinks, “Corporations are great and appalling things. They take you and shape you in nearly nothing flat, twist and swivel you. And they do it without overt persuasion, they do it with smiles and nods, a collective inflection of the voice. You stand at the head of a corridor and by the time you walk to the far end you have adopted the comprehensive philosophy of the firm, the Weltanschauung.” DeLillo has some fun with Nick’s job in waste management, offering descriptions of sublime landfill mountains, mock philosophies about civilization evolving as a response to garbage, and accounts of Nick and his wife’s tendencies to see all new commodities first as garbage, then as products to be used. The novel links waste to history by questioning whether historical truth is not just potentially hidden but even lost as waste, like the scraps of paper that blow away unnoticed from the baseball game. But as he flies to a formerly socialist country, Nick recognizes the loss of difference that accompanies the worldwide extension of capital. Repeating an argument he heard earlier, Nick reflects, “Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisition, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that’s electronic and sex that’s cyberspace, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire – not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.” “But even as desire tends to specialize, going silky and intimate, the force of converging markets produces an instantaneous capital that shoots across horizons at the speed of light, making for a certain furtive sameness, a planing away of particulars that affects everything from architecture to leisure time to the way people eat and sleep and dream.” Although his inner history has been one of redemption, Nick remains nostalgic for the past: “I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real.” Klara Sax, an older woman who had an affair with Nick when he was only sixteen, makes a related comment when interviewed about her art, which involves painting discarded B-52 bombers. She states, “Power meant something thirty, forty years ago. It was stable, it was focused, it was a tangible thing. . . . And it held us together, the Soviets and us. Maybe it held the world together. You could measure things.” But “Things have no limits now. Money has no limits.”DeLillo ends the novel with a reflection on history and the internet, pointing out that on the web there is no space or time, “only connections." DeLillo seems enticed by yet skeptical of the utopia of cyberspace, where all of history seems to coexist in a virtual electronic present. He ends with a glimpse of the real world and history still “offscreen, unwebbed.”