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Review [published December 1998]
Don DeLillo: Underworld
Gary Marshall
Starting with a 1951 baseball game and ending with
the internet, Underworld is not a book for the fainthearted.
Elegiac in tone and described variously as
DeLillo’s Magnum Opus and his attempt to write the
Great American Novel, the book weighs in at a hefty
827 pages and zips back and forwards in time, moving
in and out of the lives of a plethora of different
characters.
Following three main themes – the fate of a baseball
from the winning game of the 1951 world series, the
threat of atomic warfare and the mountains of garbage
created by modern society – DeLillo moves forwards
and backwards through the decades, introducing characters
and situations and gradually showing the way
their lives are interconnected.
Reading the prose can be uncannily like using a web
browser: the narrative focus moves from character to
character almost as quickly as we are introduced to
them, and the time frame regularly changes to show
further connections between the key players. This device
– literature as hypertext – is particularly effective
in the early parts of the novel and the technique never
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intrudes on the story itself.
The book focuses on Nick Shay, a former hoodlum
who now works in the burgeoning waste management
industry and owns the baseball from the 1951
game, “the shot heard around the world”. In addition
to Nick we hear from Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover,
Lenny Bruce and the various people who move
in and out of Nick’s life: lovers, family, friends and
colleagues. Through these seemingly disconnected
narratives DeLillo paints a picture of Cold War paranoia
at its peak – the baseball game happened the
same day as the USSR’s first nuclear test – and the
changes affecting his characters as a microcosm of
American society as a whole.
Very few writers, however, can justify over 800
densely-printed pages to tell a story and Underworld
would have benefited greatly from judicious wielding
of the blue pencil. Potentially intriguing plots which
feature strongly in the earlier parts of the book – an intriguing
serial killer subplot, the stories of each person
who possesses the winning baseball – are abandoned
halfway through the book in favour of overlong child-
192
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