Underworld - Don DeLillo

I think Underworld is the first piece of unquestionably great literature that I have read since retiring from the classroom five years ago. I've read lots of great books since then, but they have mostly been political treatises, not fiction. I have read some Phillip Roth, but my fiction reading has been confined mostly to mysteries like Stieg Larson's trilogy, or C.J. Box, or Carl Hiassen. These are all good books and fun reads, but they have the staying power of a ride on a roller coaster. Fun, yes, but nothing that lasts. I have to admit I've been feeling a little guilty about my reading, but good old Don DeLillo has come to the rescue in spades.

It is interesting how different my approach to literature is now that I'm not preparing anything for a class. When I taught APE and CCB I never read for pleasure, although pleasure I certainly got. My entire purpose for reading any new book back then was exclusively to see if I could use it in class. How would it enhance the thematic glue of the class? How would it connect to Brave New World, or Portrait of the Artist? I would sit down with a yellow legal pad, color coded hi liters, and lots of space. I would take pages of notes on each chapter, jotting down connections and identifying possible thesis statements, always coming up with a list of inductive questions that would sneakily lead my students to paper ideas. I always had class in mind. How would this new work help my kids get higher scores on the AP test?

I approached Underworld differently. If you were to look through my copy you would notice precious few underlinings. More telling, you would find a binding still in tact and no dog-eared pages. I would never attempt to teach this book (800 plus pages and a morass-like plot that wanders all over the last half century with characters that show up on page ten and are not heard from again until page 700), but if I did I would have to pull out the yellow legal pad and hi liters and start all over again. What I did instead was follow William Hurt's advice in The Big Chill and just let the art flow over me. It was a wonderful experience.

The sheer scope of DeLillo's accomplishment is my main reaction to the novel. He "focuses" on two characters: Klara Sax, an avant garde artist of some renown, and Nick Shay, a middle aged man trying to come to grips with a checkered past. Nick and Klara had a brief fling some years back and have reunited for a brief time at an "art site" in New Mexico upon which I will not elaborate. There are many questions about both of their pasts hinted at and eventually answered and these questions give the novel the bones of a plot, but plot is not what DeLillo is about here, or anywhere for that matter.

He introduces these two loosely connected characters and then uses their stories and all the connections they have individually made over the past fifty years to provide an epic overview of the successes and ravages of pop culture in that time. It is almost like Googling Nick Shay's name and then randomly following every link until some semblance of order is found.

The novel starts with Bobby Thompson's epic homerun that cinched the pennant for the Dodgers in 1952 and then loosely traces the ownership of the homerun ball from one hapless owner to the next as the ball moves through to the end of the twentieth century. It provides the closest thing DeLillo offers as the string of a narrative, kind of like the constantly changing number of missions in Catch-22. Additionally, the narrative keeps coming back to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the seeming evanescence of twentieth century life created by THE BOMB. This is punctuated by repeated forays into nightclubs where Lenny Bruce ("WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE") is performing his increasingly paranoid rants.

Klara Sax and her large public statements of art (decorating defunct weapons of mass destruction, for example) provides a further backdrop and behind it all we are given a glimpse into professional waste managers who try to deal with the detritus of pop culture and who work under the the conviction that culture is a product of waste run amok. When a people accumulate enough waste, they have to create a way to dispose of it and a culture is born. When cultures die or disappear (see The Mayans, for example)it is because they have become overcome by their refuse and just move on. Then the refuse becomes the art of archeology, and so on. Like all DeLillo books, the ideas are more than a little thrilling.

And like all DeLillo books, there is something brilliant, beautiful, provocative, or just plain outrageous on every page. And the good news is that all these random links come more and more into focus with each succeeding page, so that even though you might have only an inkling of what is going on from page to page and chapter to chapter, it all becomes crashingly clear by the end and the dutiful reader is left to scrape himself off the wall when it is all over.

Wonderful, wonderful. All I have left to say is, thank you Andy Sell for getting me to read Don DeLillo in the first place.