Reading Underworld

My 1998 paperback featuring an ominous photo of the World Trade Center on the cover. These towers would fall three years later.

“It is all falling indelibly into the past.”

That line appears early in Don DeLillo’s Underworld and serves as a wonderful encapsulation of the entire novel. Everything in the book is falling into the past. The Cold War. The Polo Grounds. Bobby Thomson’s home run. J. Edgar Hoover. Lenny Bruce. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Nixon. The Zapruder film. The Bronx. The great postwar promise of American life. The garbage that promise produced.

It is all falling, but it is not disappearing. That is the key. It falls indelibly. It leaves marks.

I first read Underworld not long after it appeared. My copy is the 1998 Scribner first paperback edition, the one with the epic, ominous photograph of the World Trade Center on the cover. All page references here are to that edition.

I doubt DeLillo chose the cover. That was almost certainly a publisher’s decision. September 11 had not happened yet. The towers still stood there as an image of urban mass, capitalism, height, scale, and late-century American confidence. Yet the photograph already felt ominous. It was innocent in the literal sense. It did not know what was coming. But it fit the novel’s atmosphere of dread, residue, and hidden consequence.

Now the innocence is gone. The image has been changed by history. It has also been outflanked by history. The world that came after Underworld was defined by September 11, global warming, proxy wars and the smartphone. DeLillo’s novel does not predict anything. Cyberspace gets a short mention. It belongs to the moment just before, when human garbage and waste still seemed like the next great existential disaster after nuclear war.

That makes the paperback cover almost too appropriate. It is an object whose meaning changed after the fact. It fell indelibly into the past.

The novel begins with one of the great set pieces in modern American fiction. The date is October 3, 1951. The New York Giants play the Brooklyn Dodgers in a one-game playoff at the Polo Grounds. Bobby Thomson hits “The Shot Heard ’Round the World.” The Giants win the pennant. Somewhere in the grandstand is a young black kid named Cotter Martin, who has sneaked into the game and ends up with the famous baseball. Also present are Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover, sitting together in a celebrity box like a slightly ridiculous American allegory.

This is over the top. It is also fun to read.

Hoover learns during the game that the Soviets have detonated a major nuclear device. So the baseball game and the nuclear age get joined from the start. American pastime and Cold War terror. Cheering crowd and apocalyptic dread. DeLillo is not being subtle. He seldom is in this novel. But the prologue works beautifully because it is alive with movement, crowd noise, social tension, class, race, celebrity, fear, hunger, and luck.

The prologue was first published separately as a short story, Pafko at the Wall, which helps explain why it feels so complete. It has its own life. It may be the best thing in the novel. That is not an insult to the rest of the book. It is just a fact of the reading experience. The opening has a charge the novel never fully sustains.

After this opening, the novel jumps to the 1990s and begins moving backward. Spring-Summer 1992. The mid-1980s to early 1990s. Spring 1978. Summer 1974. Then “Selected Fragments Public and Private in the 1950s and 1960s,” which bounces around and contains the excellent Lenny Bruce and Cuban Missile Crisis material.

The structure tells us what kind of novel this is. DeLillo is not moving toward the future. There is almost no future in the novel. The 1980s and 1990s sections do not feel like the beginning of something new. They feel like aftermath. The book is trying to capture the entire span of the Cold War, from the charged public drama of the 1950s to its exhausted end. The future once promised by the 1950s has become, in many ways, garbage to be dumped somewhere.

Nick Shay works in waste and garbage. He is the continuing human presence through this backward movement. We meet him as an adult in waste management, controlled, competent, damaged, then gradually move back toward the Bronx childhood and adolescence that formed him. Nick is not always a gripping character. He often feels sealed off. But that is part of the point. He manages waste for a living and manages his own past in much the same way.

Contain it. Route it. Store it. Keep it from leaking.

Alongside Nick there is the baseball, the ball hit by Thomson that was, incredibly, lost thus allowing for this telling. It travels through the novel in a loose, often almost random chain of possession. It appears in different hands, different rooms, different decades. Sometimes, it is the object of the story in the world of collectors. Sometimes it is just junk in a room.

At first, I expected the baseball to function as the great organizing relic of the novel. It does not. The baseball story more or less fizzles. It becomes a series of nearly disassociated episodes. It is less a thread than a recurring object, a mute witness, a thing people want to believe carries history.

A relic is only an object with a story successfully attached to it. The baseball is not powerful because it explains the century. It is powerful because people want it to explain something. It begins in collective ecstasy, a home run, a crowd, a public myth. Then it becomes private property. That seems very American. The communal moment becomes an object somebody owns, may have even forgotten.

The deeper organizing object in Underworld is not the baseball. It is garbage.

DeLillo does a neat sleight of hand in this novel. He does not attack consumption directly, though consumer culture is obviously behind much of what he is writing about. There is actually very little shopping in the novel. Very little direct attention to buying, advertising, or the seductions of the marketplace. Instead, he goes downstream. He attacks waste.

Consumption is the bright side of the system. Waste is the secret record. What people buy says something about them. What they throw away may say more.

One of the best statements of the book’s real subject appears on page 288: “We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage first, then we deal a system to deal with it.”

This is where waste and time become the same subject. Garbage is the physical form of the past. Not the noble past of monuments, speeches, photographs, and anniversaries. The real past. The used-up and thrown away past. The packaging, residue, broken tools, spent chemicals, buried toxins, household remains, nuclear leftovers.

The garbage theme is not secondary to the novel’s backward movement. It is one of the ways the backward movement becomes material. The baseball carries public memory. Nick carries private guilt. Waste carries the history nobody meant to preserve. DeLillo’s genius is to see garbage not as a problem after culture, but as culture’s most honest record.

By the time DeLillo wrote Underworld, the garbage crisis was already part of late twentieth-century life. Landfills, toxic waste, nuclear waste, medical waste, plastic waste, disposal panic. The Cold War was ending and the next global disaster seemed to be garbage. Not global warming, at least not culturally. Scientists knew about climate change. Carl Sagan had already testified about it. But it was not yet the dominant public fear. Garbage was visible. Garbage smelled. Garbage had trucks.

Nuclear waste gave garbage metaphysical weight. The bomb might not go off, but its leftovers remained. They had to be stored, buried, monitored, renamed, hidden. The Cold War did not end cleanly. It leaked into the ground and atmosphere.

That is where Underworld is strongest. It captures the shift from nuclear apocalypse to managed trash. From the fear that the world might end in a flash to the quieter fear that the world would continue under the accumulating weight of what we could not dispose of. The future did not explode. It became a storage problem.

The title is part of this. Underworld seems to come partly through Unterwelt, an apparently lost Eisenstein film in the novel, though the association remains slippery. There was also a real gangster film called Underworld that was a hit in 1927. Both film titles hover around DeLillo’s title. Cinema, crime, shadows, underground history.

But the novel also builds its own vocabulary of “under” words.

On page 563, Hoover thinks: “Through the battered century of world wars and massive violence by others, there had always been an undervoice that spoke through the cannon fire and ack-ack that sometimes grew strong enough to merge with the battle sounds. It was the struggle between the state and secret groups of insurgents, state-born, wild-eyed - the anarchists, terrorists, assassins and revolutionaries who tried to bring about apocalyptic change.”

That is Hoover’s underworld. The hidden political voice beneath the public century. State power listening for enemies. Assassins, anarchists, terrorists, revolutionaries. Hoover hears history as subversion. The century has a hidden soundtrack, and he wants to file it.

Then on page 791, Nick gives us another version: “He says waste is the devil twin. Because waste is the secret history, the underhistory, the way archaeologists dig out the history of early cultures, every sort of bone heap and broken tool, literally under the ground.”

That may be the most revealing line about the title. Waste is the underhistory. Not the official history. Not the textbook history. The buried one. The bone heap and broken tool. The thing nobody meant to preserve that ends up telling the truth anyway.

This is where DeLillo sets himself up for trouble. He is not afraid to say what he is doing. He is writing the underhistory of the Cold War era. That is a large ambition. Maybe too large.

The book includes Hoover, Nixon, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Zapruder film, Lenny Bruce, nuclear anxiety, garbage, art, baseball, crime, Catholic memory, New York City, Arizona, corporate waste systems, and private damage. It wants to feel panoramic. In places it does.

But the range is narrower than the size of the book suggests.

There are maybe 3 or 4 paragraphs about the Vietnam War. There is very little if anything on the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King Jr. barely exists, if he exists at all. For a novel trying to capture the second half of the American twentieth century, that absence is rather loud. It is not that DeLillo is incapable of historical specificity. He is perfectly capable of it when the subject suits him. Hoover hearing about the Soviet bomb test at the Giants-Dodgers game is specific. The Zapruder film stuff is specific. Lenny Bruce during the Cuban Missile Crisis is detailed.

Apparently, DeLillo likes history when it becomes image, tape, file, relic, rumor, undercurrent, contamination, or performance. Lenny Bruce fits him wonderfully. Bruce is language under pressure. Obscenity, comedy, paranoia, Jewishness, Cold War dread, and public collapse all at once. DeLillo’s prose comes alive in those sections. He catches the rhythm of a mind performing at the edge of breakdown and revelation. Bruce feels like a cultural antenna picking up signals nobody else wants to admit are in the air.

The Civil Rights Movement would require a different kind of novel. A novel of organized struggle. Public speech. Collective action. Moral confrontation. DeLillo is not very interested in those energies here. He is interested in systems, residues, secrecy, and replay.

That does not ruin the book. But it does not qualify it for "the great American novel" either.

The Texas Highway Killer is a good example of DeLillo inventing something that fits his true subject better than a direct historical event might have. The killer seems to be fictional, though he also seems frighteningly relatable today. Kudos for that.

The killer is less compelling as a criminal profile than as a media object. A child accidentally records one of the killings on videotape. The tape is then replayed. Random death becomes public image. Another little Zapruder film. Another piece of violence the culture can watch, repeat, slow down, discuss, absorb, and fail to understand.

There is a chapter from the killer’s perspective. He seems like a normal man. He takes care of his parents. He seems ambitionless, almost blank. Then he gets ready to kill. The detail that stays with me is that he puts on a white lady’s glove before starting his car.

That is marvelous. Twisted, menacing, exact. DeLillo does not need a long psychological explanation. The glove is enough. It turns killing into ritual. It is delicate and obscene. It suggests costume, femininity, cleanliness, theatricality, and derangement all at once. A white lady’s glove on the hand that starts the car. The car becomes the killing space. The glove becomes the doorway.

This is DeLillo at his best. One object opens a whole private underworld.

The prose throughout the novel can be brilliant. The prologue is marvelous. The Lenny Bruce sections are brilliant in their way. The Klara Sax desert art material has real force, especially the image of old bombers turned into painted forms in the desert. The idea is obvious but powerful. Cold War machinery becomes art. The object of destruction becomes aesthetic residue. The dead machine gets a new surface. It is even hopeful.

Still, the novel is not gripping overall. At least it was not gripping to me, either time I read it. I enjoyed returning to it after many years because I had forgotten so much of it. But the book did not pull me along. It impressed me. It interested me. It often dazzled me for sections and paragraphs. It did not grip me.

I think the first half is stronger than the second. I also think the novel could have been trimmed by 200 pages and been better for it. DeLillo’s grand design requires some sprawl. The problem is that some of the sprawl feels necessary and some of it feels like prestige sprawl. Everybody in the novel also tends to sound like DeLillo. They all talk like New Yorkers, even when they are not. The dialogue has the same clipped, intelligent, abstract quality again and again. Sometimes that creates atmosphere. Sometimes it falls flat.

Another odd absence is music. Sinatra is at the ballgame, but music as lived culture barely exists in the novel. For a book spanning the 1950s through the early 1990s, this seems like a real gap. Rock, soul, and hip-hop alone would have given DeLillo almost every major American pressure point he otherwise pursues: race, sex, commerce, rebellion, memory, performance, identity.

But DeLillo is much more interested in image than song. Film, television, surveillance, news footage, videotape, the Zapruder film. He understands performance when it is verbal, as with Lenny Bruce. Music as something people live through is mostly missing. That makes the cultural portrait cooler than it should be.

But maybe coolness is part of the book’s condition. Underworld is a nostalgic novel, though not warmly nostalgic. There is certainly nothing kitsch about it. The later sections are not openings. They are aftereffects. The past is everywhere. It is sedimentary. Everything has already happened and is now being stored, collected, buried, replayed, painted, sold, remembered, or thrown away.

This is true of the century and it is true of Nick Shay. At the chronological beginning of the novel, in 1992, Nick’s defining act is already far behind him. As a boy he accidentally killed someone. Early in the novel this is only alluded to. DeLillo lets it sit there as a pressure in Nick’s life, something buried but not gone. Very sneaky. Only near the end of the novel, as the book has traveled backward some thirty-five years, does the event fully appear as the event it was.

In this novel’s method, the beginning is already aftermath. The present is already haunted. The future has almost no force at all. The book does not move toward revelation so much as back into the conditions that made revelation unnecessary. The damage was there all along.

The famous baseball falls into the past, practically lost. Nick falls backward into his own past, inescapable. The Cold War falls into waste. Better Living Through Chemistry falls into contamination. Public spectacle falls into private ownership. Official history falls into underhistory.

That is why the page 60 line is so good. “It is all falling indelibly into the past.”

At times brilliant, Underworld is as good as anything I've read on America near the end of the last century. It is a fine fictional document with some heavy historical content. It is not as complete as it might seem to be but that does not make it a waste of time. I would recommend it to anyone interested in American literature.