Date posted: January 1, 1999

Don DeLillo, Underworld

Underworld by Don DeLillo is drenched in nostalgia. But maybe nostalgia isn’t the right word. Resignation too, sounds too sad, when it’s a form of happiness, happiness without bursting with joy, a feeling of quiescence, of tranquility, a moment outside of time, when ambitions, worries, sorrows evaporate, when you experience yourself from the outside and know that this is you, that this is your life, that you are here and now, and that you live.

It is when you realize when you’re having a cold that it will be over in a week’s time and that within a few months or so you’ll probably have another cold and what’s the point in being irritated, it comes with the illness. And you suddenly remember that night when you walked through Little Venice. Or that evening when you’d just seen a performance by your favorite dance company and you had to rush to get the night train back to where you lived. And that beautiful girl who had also been to the performance helped you with your luggage as you tried to get through those narrow Paris underground gates. You talked about the show, but she had to take another line. As you paced towards your platform you thought of what could have been if. Yet somehow it all fitted.

"It was so humid some nights you could not close your door. You had to shoulder your door closed. Bridges expanded and sidewalks cracked and there was garbage in the streets and you had to sort of talk to your door before it would close for you.
She loved the nights that were electrical, a static in the air and lightning in soft pulses, in great shapeless beats, you can almost read the rhythmic pattern, slow and protoplasmal, and maybe Cinzano awning fixed to a table on a higher terrace – you can’t identify that gunshot sound until you spot the striped awning, edges snapping in the breeze.
Klara was happy in a guarded way, keeping it folded close. She had a sense of being favored, fairly well-regarded for recent work, feeling good again after a spell of back pain and insomnia, clear-minded after a brief depression, saving money after a spending spree, getting out and seeing friends and standing at parapets, quietly happy, looking better than she had in years – they all said so."

Underworld opens with a magnificent near cinematic display of the historic baseball playoff in which the Giants beat the Dodgers. It’s October 3, 1951, the same day America learns the Soviet Union has exploded an atomic bomb. Two shots heard around the world. Two events that will resonate throughout the book. Don DeLillo has the talent of showing how the political and the global invade private lives and how individual events can shape world history. This is sensitivity to small perturbations, this is chaos theory without the theory. This is life.

Among the spectators is one J. Edgar Hoover, a singer called Frank Sinatra, Cotter Martin, a young boy who has skipped school to go to the game and goes home with the winning ball, and Nick Shay, the novel’s protagonist, at the time a wandering adolescent. Many years later he will buy the alleged game-winning ball, which to him has become a symbol of his life.

But Nick Shay is not the only person in the novel who has become obsessed with the ball and has made it into his life’s goal to find it. But of course after Cotter Martin none of the persons who thinks he owns it will ever know for sure whether it really is THE ball. Through a strange twist of fate this running theme would be overtaken by reality in 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa competed for the record number of homeruns. But this time around all balls were numbered.

Underworld is a caleidoscope of major and minor storylines. Its near constant shift of focus creates an astounding patchwork of the second half of the 20th century.

We meet Nick Shay, who grew up in the Bronx, and whose father disappeared mysteriously when he was a boy. At 50 he works with a company called Waste Containment. He is an expert in the excrements of society and the fall out from the Cold War: nuclear waste and chemical waste.

We meet Klara Sax with whom Nick Shay had an affair when he was seventeen and she was a married woman and mother to a child. She is an artist who in 1992 paints discarded bombers, remnants of a war that never happened, that are stalled in the middle of the desert.

We meet Sister Edgar, who, in the mid 90’s, fights a lost war against the decay of the Bronx.

We meet a notorious graffiti artist who roams the underground of New York and who’s got a pregnant girlfriend. We meet a highway serial killer and we meet Charles and Jerry and everybody seems to have discovered some deep truth in life. For as with all DeLillo’s novels, Underworld overflows with sentences that somehow sound true, sentences you wish to remember and quote.

"It was a gesture without history. (…) You can’t describe the movement properly because it was a level of reality you hadn’t rehearsed, either one of you".

And of course there is that nostalgia again, or whatever you want to call it, everywhere, "And this was the other thing they shared, the sadness and clarity of time, time mourned in music - how the sound, the shaped vibrations made by hammers striking wire strings made them feel an odd sorrow not for particular things but for time itself, the material feel of a year or an age, the textures of unmeasured time that were lost to them now, and she turned away, looking past her lifted hand into some transparent thing he thought he could call her life."

And the innocent lines which for me have a special meaning "Klara conducted dialogues with her body, reminding herself before she got out of a chair where it was she wanted to go, to the kitchen maybe for a spoon, and exactly how she would have to get there. She needed to locate her body in a situation, tell herself where she was, sometimes looking back as if she might still be sitting in the chair."

And then there are the crowds which are DeLillo’s trademark, and which he is able to render like no other.

"Coming home, landing at Sky Harbor, I used to wonder how people disperse so quickly from airports, any airport – how you are crowded into seats three across or five across and crowded in the aisle after touchdown when the captain turns off the seat belt sign and you get your belongings from the overhead and stand in the aisle waiting for the hatch to open and the crowd to shuffle forward, and there are more crowds when you exit the gate, people disembarking and others waiting for them and greater crowds in the baggage areas and the concourse, the crossover roars of echoing voices and flight announcements and revving engines and crowds moving through it all, people with their separate and unique belongings, the microhistory of toilet articles and intimate garments, the medicines and aspirines and lotions and powders and gels, so incredibly many people intersecting on some hot dry day at the edge of the desert, used underwear fistballed in their bags, and I wondered where they were going, and why, and who are they, and how do they all disperse so quickly and mysteriously, how does a vast crowd scatter and vanish in miutes, bags dragging on the shiny floors."

It is sentences like these which instantly make me feel at home, because they describe the questions I myself have often asked and the feelings I myself often feel. It is for this reason too that Underworld resonates with my own life and that I like to return to it from time to time.