a review by David Pelovitz
Unknowable details, unusual chronologies, the interplay between the
individual and the crowd, unofficial histories, and the conversion of trash
to art are all themes present in DeLillo's earlier works, but in Underworld,
he weaves them together into a history of Cold War America that is his most ambitious
novel to date. The result is a masterwork.
The novel opens with a prologue composed of scenes from the 1951 baseball
playoff between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers in which Bobby Thomson
hits "the shot heard round the world" to win the pennant for the Giants. He offers us
glimpses of the famous and the ordinary: Russ Hodges nursing a sore throat while announcing
the game; the owners's box, occupied by Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor, Frank Sinatra, and
J. Edgar Hoover; and Cotter Martin, a Harlem youth who has jumped the gate to see the game
and who befriends Bill Waterson, a middle-aged fan. The game in progress, Hoover receives
news that the Soviets have tested a nuclear bomb. While Hoover contemplates an image of
mass death, Ralph Branca and Bobby Thomson make baseball history, Hodges spins the game
for the radio audience, and Cotter and Bill engage in their own struggle for the
game-winning ball.
From here, DeLillo sends the narrative in two different directions. The bulk
of the novel is divided into segments of a few months to twenty years, in reverse
chronological order. When the novel moves ahead to the 1990s, it fixes its attention
on Nick Shay and Klara Sax who had been lovers in the early 1950s when they lived in the
same Bronx neighborhood. Now, Klara is a famous artist running a desert art collective
engaged in repainting decommissioned bombers, and Nick is a waste analyst living in
Phoenix with his family. While Nick manages society's garbage, Klara converts it into
art. Garbage is a persistent theme in Underworld.
We soon learn that Nick has bought what he believes to be the historic
game-winning ball. To him, it has special meaning; "It's about the mystery of bad luck,
the mystery of loss." But Nick's boss, Big Sims, disputes Nick's claim that the ball is
authentic and offers another view: "The mythology of the game. Nobody ever showed and
made a verifiable claim to this is the ball. Or a dozen people showed up each with a ball,
which amounts to the same thing."
The novel then takes us back in time to the story of how Nick got the ball, and
of the missing hours between the end of the game and the purchase of the ball the next
day by a man named Wainwright. DeLillo continues to widen his focus to include much of
Nick's family, Klara's ex-husband, figures from the old Bronx neighborhood, and several
people who owned the baseball, and pieces together a history of late Twentieth
Century American counterpoint to the mystery of the ball. Entwined through this narrative
is an account of the baseball's progress during the night after the game.
The ball's story is more traditional, moving forward and remaining fairly consistent
in its point of view.
This narrative device works on several levels. The moment the narratives divide
is the moment when America realizes the Soviets have nuclear weapons; the division in the
story reflects the pivotal dividing of political balance in world history. The backward
chronology creates the sense of digging into the cultural trash pile of history, while the
forward motion of the ball's movement in time suggests a recycling of culture. In this dual
history, DeLillo celebrates post-Cold War Post-Modernism in his view of history as
"recycled," and by his allusions to works by Post Modern writers like Pynchon, Heller
and Reed.
DeLillo establishes the Giants/Dodgers game and the winning ball as symbols
for the Cold War era; He draws parallels between baseball and nuclear devices, such as
the fact that the radioactive core of a nuclear bomb is the same size as a baseball. He
shows presidents posed with baseball heros, who vie with world leaders as enduring
cultural forces. He makes associations between the Series game and the novel's structure;
a collector of baseball memorabilia who hoped to identify the ball's first owner by
looking at pictures from the Polo Grounds says, "I looked at a million photographs because
this is the dot theory of reality, that all knowledge is available if you analyze the
dots." In Underworld, the dots are individual stories that resolve into a
history of an era.
Nick, Klara and the winning ball are characters whose stories represent
different perspectives and historical movements; but the novel is also populated by nuns,
nuclear weapons designers, memorabilia collectors, a child chess prodigy, heroin users,
Bronx punks, organized crime figures, graffiti artists, wife-swappers, a soldier who
observed an atomic test, and a serial killer. These characters expound on the Soviets,
art, garbage, self-control, love, and history, among other things. They are all in the
predicament of a baseball announcer who cannot see the game he is reporting -they must
invent their own details to make a story out of the raw facts. They do this by watching
films, spinning conspiracy theories (most memorably about Gorbachev's birthmark and
Greenland's existence), searching for numerological patterns, putting faith in God, and
choosing what they will believe about their individual and collective pasts. Personal
observations play a dominant role in this novel, and even the celebrities make them:
Jackie Gleason makes jokes about the foibles of his audience, Lenny Bruce makes deadly
quips during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and J. Edgar Hoover makes history by observing the
clandestine activities of his fellow Americans.
Garbage figures prominently in Nick's and Klara's careers and it infiltrates
every part of the story. Nuns help the homeless in a Bronx junkyard, paper scraps fall
on Branca and Thomson as they face off in the playoff game. We witness garbage strikes,
junkies, nuclear waste, and a garbage scow that no nation will accept adrift at sea.
Yet DeLillo suggests that garbage is what we make of it; he even suggests that nuclear
bombs might be recycled and put to positive use. We can see the detritus of our lives
either as trash which will eventually bury us or as ingredients from which we can make
new lives.