Book Review: "Underworld" by Don DeLillo

Underworld (1997)

5 Stars out of 5

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo has constructed a modern masterpiece with his novel, "Underworld", a novel about American life in the second half of the twentieth century. This very ambitious and very long (827 pages) novel begins with a beautifully written prolog that describes “the shot heard around the world”, that is the 1951 play-off game between the NY Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. This prolog is a marvelous introduction to the novel as it sets into play one of the sub-plots within the book, uses spot on dialog that is key to the era and the characters, but even more importantly, as it introduces the reader to the consummate literary skill that DeLillo employs throughout the entire novel.

“Underworld” as a title seems to suggest something sinister, but in fact refers to a metaphorical burying of things best left in the past. The primary protagonist, Nick Shay commits a murder while still a youth, spends some time in detention, but grows to adulthood where he finds a career as an executive for a waste management company; a career that is unmistakably consistent with the title and theme of the novel. The book’s storyline that involves Nick’s middle-age describes a man with a failing marriage; a troubled man worried about himself, his marriage, and the concept of literally burying trash as well as his attempt to metaphorically bury his own dark secret. DeLillo does not take the reader straight from the baseball game in 1951 to Nick’s twilight years in a linear fashion. Rather, he sets the 1950’s scene in the prolog and then jumps to the early twenty-first century and Nick. He then works backward, almost decade by decade, back to the early fifties to when Nick commits his crime. The reader learns of Nick’s consequences long before his crime is made clear. The reader knows there has been a crime, knows Nick is broken in some manner, but lacks the details and must decipher the clues as a normal person would when meeting someone for the first time. The story is told in the third person omniscient, but the narrator keeps some of his secrets to the book’s ending.

DeLillo’s use of time sequencing for “Underworld” is a challenge to the reader. It is very easy due to DeLillo’s marvelous storytelling and dialog to lose oneself in any of the vignettes that make up “Underworld”. But then as a certain pace is built within one of the sub-stories, a certain dramatic tension created, DeLillo concludes the chapter and storyline in question and quickly jumps to another character within the novel, or possibly jumps to an earlier decade entirely, maybe with the same character from the previous chapter, perhaps with a completely new character. This is a challenge to the reader in a manner that kept me thinking of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”. DeLillo doesn’t use Joyce’s almost hallucinogenic style of prose wherein seemingly nearly random thoughts frequently penetrate the storyline (see also Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” for more of this style). Instead DeLillo uses a complex series of sub-stories (not hallucinogenic but definitely complex) to tell a tale of remarkable character complexity; so complex a set of stories and characters, that dedicated attention is required of the reader to make sense of the overall story. “Underworld” surely was far from easy to write, it is quite necessarily difficult to read.

A casual reader though could still take great pleasure in merely reading short sections of the book. Such a reader could (as noted above) enjoy the crisp prose and dialog, or find interest in some of the stories embedded in the overall novel. Consider the opening prolog wherein DeLillo describes in careful detail how Ralph Branca pitching for the Dodgers gave up a winning homerun to the Giants’ Bobby Thompson. By itself a riveting and dramatic story the way DeLillo tells it. But he also manages to include a strange little sub-story within that includes J. Edgar Hoover and his fascination with a painting by Bruegel, some wisecracking by Jackie Gleason, and a somewhat tension filled walk home by a young African American man that obtained the winning fly ball. Other stories that stand by themselves include one from the early sixties that describes the terror that filled the air as America and the Soviet Union appeared to be on a one-way street to nuclear oblivion; and incredibly, DeLillo uses Lenny Bruce as a contemporary comedian to use his acerbic humor as the narrator of those fears. Another excellent story, this one from the seventies involves an older married woman from Nick’s past, one with whom he had sexual relations as a teen, she is now a mature artist; an artist directing the artistic  painting of retired US Air Force bombers; bombers that were once part of America’s nuclear deterrent in the sixties.

“Underworld” does have an overall arc, one told in an inverse time order. Besides the story of Nick’s adult life and how he got there, it also tells the story of the winning fly ball and the various people that seek to own it. But mostly DeLillo is creating a picture of America in the last half of the twentieth century. And he is using a writing style that might be compared to a painting style such as pointillism, or even more accurately as an artform such as a kind of “mosaicism”; a kind of mosaic where each part of the mosaic is made up of an individual picture. The reader/ viewer can look at each piece of the mosaic and enjoy it for its own sake, or step back, so to speak, and enjoy the overall picture.  And this big picture is America at a certain contented/fraught time in its history. A time filled with kids opening fire hydrants to play in during the summer heat, a different time where one might drive through the back woods while simultaneously worrying about nuclear destruction and participating in the hedonistic lifestyle of the hippy era, or yet another time, this one that includes the encroaching internet, a time where one never feels alone and disconnected, maybe when one never feels at peace.

These nostalgic and bittersweet views of American life coupled with the real terror of the Cold War and the possibly equally terrifying loss of privacy era we now live in are done by DeLillo in a manner that allows the reader to dip into this majestic book and enjoy. Enjoy it for a brief swim through one of these eras for nostalgic sake, for a historical perspective, or if the reader is too young to have lived in these eras, for an educational lesson. In some ways, this novel is like a magnum of fine wine; one could try to drink it down all at once, but why do so? Sip it, and take pleasure in the work of one of America’s best novelists from the late twentieth century.