This novel works very well at the micro level of style – it’s sort of an 800-page prose poem – but at the macro level of narrative it’s less effective. I don’t mean to cast aspersions here, just to make a general observation about a work of art I genuinely admire. I don’t remember when I bought it, but the back cover has a sticker on it that says “12/98” along with the retail price: $19.95. On the first page, where the author’s bio is located, someone has written “B-$12” and “R-$5”, so presumably I paid the former amount in order to take the volume home with me. Though I have no recollection, now, where that transaction took place.
If the novel can be said to be “about” anything it’s like a prayer more than a statement of belief. As though the uncertainty inherent in the American experiment – something surprising in its inception and of varied success in its performance – breeds, in the hearts of its participants, a longing for security. DeLillo is of my parents’ generation, or thereabouts, so I can appreciate his misgivings about something that draws so much criticism from so many quarters.
There seems to be a wild, wilful desire among American prose writers to fashion something all-encompassing, using words – the material they possess an aspiration to wield in an effort to make something of value, something lasting – that can live up to the hype (the promise, if you will) of the whole enterprise: the four-yearly elections, the reliable holidays, the pledges, the politeness, the habit of tipping wait staff after meals eaten in restaurants, the ludicrous healthcare system, the inadequate minimum wage, the enormous sovereign debt, the guns, the endless wars, the local pride of Kentuckian or Hoosier, the vast expanses of dry, dusty countryside, the poverty, the thousands of migrants who turn up every year (legally or illegally) looking for a piece of the American Dream, the prom nights, the Halloween costumes for children let out for one autumn night on the dark streets of every suburb and town in the wide land …
Many of these experiments in nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and semicolons (among other things) fail to gain purchase in the collective (global) imagination. Or else they are casually categorised as another in a long line of such expressions of American exceptionalism worthy of note, if not of the time needed to read the damn things. So many tons of paper used and discarded, or else sent to the op-shop for some other punter (not you, anymore) to pick up for a few dollars and take home in a recycled Coles shopping bag (that possibly once contained a bottle of orange juice and a roll of plastic garbage bags). So many discards, so many failed dreams of greatness; and an inexpressible longing for peace at last.
Peace at last! The Twin Towers feature on the book’s cover and appear from time to time in the text. Like a ghost seen in a dream. Works like ‘Underworld’ are the flip-side of spy thrillers, which are books pumped out by the truckload in a vapid frenzy of production and consumption, usually badly-written and often nasty in their characterisation. As well as stylistic brilliance, ‘Underworld’ has grace with the use of credible characters, such as Nick Shay, the Bronx boy who rises to the top in the waste-management business. But the riddle of the baseball from a 1951 World Series match between two New York teams, and the associated number “13”, remained, for me, gnomic and opaque in their signification. Strangely, however, I was reminded while reading ‘Underworld’ of a painting of Robert Rauschenberg’s titled ‘Windward’ that contains images of buildings, oranges, and fire, which I wrote about in 2013. Life constantly throws up riddles for us to decode.
If the novel can be said to be “about” anything it’s like a prayer more than a statement of belief. As though the uncertainty inherent in the American experiment – something surprising in its inception and of varied success in its performance – breeds, in the hearts of its participants, a longing for security. DeLillo is of my parents’ generation, or thereabouts, so I can appreciate his misgivings about something that draws so much criticism from so many quarters.
There seems to be a wild, wilful desire among American prose writers to fashion something all-encompassing, using words – the material they possess an aspiration to wield in an effort to make something of value, something lasting – that can live up to the hype (the promise, if you will) of the whole enterprise: the four-yearly elections, the reliable holidays, the pledges, the politeness, the habit of tipping wait staff after meals eaten in restaurants, the ludicrous healthcare system, the inadequate minimum wage, the enormous sovereign debt, the guns, the endless wars, the local pride of Kentuckian or Hoosier, the vast expanses of dry, dusty countryside, the poverty, the thousands of migrants who turn up every year (legally or illegally) looking for a piece of the American Dream, the prom nights, the Halloween costumes for children let out for one autumn night on the dark streets of every suburb and town in the wide land …
Many of these experiments in nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and semicolons (among other things) fail to gain purchase in the collective (global) imagination. Or else they are casually categorised as another in a long line of such expressions of American exceptionalism worthy of note, if not of the time needed to read the damn things. So many tons of paper used and discarded, or else sent to the op-shop for some other punter (not you, anymore) to pick up for a few dollars and take home in a recycled Coles shopping bag (that possibly once contained a bottle of orange juice and a roll of plastic garbage bags). So many discards, so many failed dreams of greatness; and an inexpressible longing for peace at last.
Peace at last! The Twin Towers feature on the book’s cover and appear from time to time in the text. Like a ghost seen in a dream. Works like ‘Underworld’ are the flip-side of spy thrillers, which are books pumped out by the truckload in a vapid frenzy of production and consumption, usually badly-written and often nasty in their characterisation. As well as stylistic brilliance, ‘Underworld’ has grace with the use of credible characters, such as Nick Shay, the Bronx boy who rises to the top in the waste-management business. But the riddle of the baseball from a 1951 World Series match between two New York teams, and the associated number “13”, remained, for me, gnomic and opaque in their signification. Strangely, however, I was reminded while reading ‘Underworld’ of a painting of Robert Rauschenberg’s titled ‘Windward’ that contains images of buildings, oranges, and fire, which I wrote about in 2013. Life constantly throws up riddles for us to decode.
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