Underworld, by Don DeLillo, Picador, 827pp, £18 in UK
For a long time Don DeLillo has been tracking America, its paranoia, its vulnerabilities, its hysteria, its images, its shaky icons, its very existence, with an epic intensity equalled only by William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon. Author of The Names (1982) a mesmeric study of displacement, and the hilarious satire White Noise (1984), DeLillo was already an established cult master well before Libra (1988) confronted America's agony with a fictional portrait of the definitive anti-hero, Lee Harvey Oswald - that self-styled "agent of history". With the publication of Mao II in 1991, DeLillo seemed not only to be challenging mass culture and America's sense of self, but the relevance of language in a world in which the word has been supplanted by the visual image.
At the opening of Mao II a crowd gathered in a vast stadium. His spectacular twelfth novel, Underworld, also begins in a famous ballpark, the Polo Grounds in New York. The difference is that whereas the previous book records a bizarre mass wedding ceremony involving passive devotees, this time the crowds are fans watching a lethargic baseball game, the outcome of which is decided on a shock home run that changes the result and apparently, mythically, the course of American Cold War history.
It is clear from the opening line - "He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful" - that DeLillo's narrative, despite its many flashes of high comedy, will be elegiac rather than satirical. Despite brash, manic moments, such as the recreation of comedian Lenny Bruce's grotesque routines, or a brilliant pastiche of the all-American, Jell-Oconsuming family circa 1957, the abiding tone is curiously touching. The book is a lament, a determinedly unsentimental attempt to express a desire to remember the past without celebrating it.
"We're all gonna die," shrieks the crazed, doomed Lennie Bruce, and most of the characters are afflicted by fear. "History is the sum total of all the things they aren't telling us," DeLillo announced in Libra, his first book to juggle fiction and history, which he also does in Mao II and again here. Public secrecy is not a dominant theme in Underworld, mainly because the characters are too involved with their own secrets and fears. DeLillo juxtaposes the legendary October 3rd, 1951, clash between the Giants and the Dodgers with the news that the Soviets have just tested their nuclear bomb. The two events share the next day's headlines.
This is not such an outrageous juxtaposition, considering the way sport reflects nationality, war, reality - life, in other words, at its most dramatic. On the day of the big game, a radio sound engineer remarks of his team's most recent loss: "This is a serious thing because a crushing defeat puts a gloom on the neigh bourhoods . . . It's demoralizing for people. It's like they're dying in the tens of thousands." Seated among the fans are Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleeson and J. Edgar Hoover. Not that baseball is Hoover's favourite sport: "He likes to be around movie idols and celebrity athletes . . . Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination . . . He wants to be their dearly devoted friend provided their hidden lives are in his private files, all the rumours collected and indexed, the shadow facts made real."
DeLillo's pen portraits of the famous are as sharp as his characterisation of the invented hopeful losers who populate the pages of this big, living book. Cotter, a young black boy, skips school to cheat his way into the stadium, and having outrun a policeman finds himself seated beside a Mr Nice Guy, fellow fan and fellow American who later battles the boy for possession of the ball which featured in the home run. The ball is the narrative's unifying device in a novel of voices and individual, interconnecting stories. "Everything is connected in the end," DeLillo announces, near the end.
As the ball changes hands, so the characters appear, fade, reappear. Nick, as remote an anti-hero as one could hope for, tells his own story. He has become a "waste analyst", after a long series of misadventures, including time spent in disciplinary institutions for murder. Tough and self-contained, he is preoccupied with the disposal of garbage, be it domestic or radioactive. When he moves to the desert, he invites his mother to join him and his family. The old lady eventually dies. "The long ghosts are walking the halls," remarks Nick; though he speaks the language of the street as snappily as the others, he can as easily - and convincingly - switch to the strange poetry DeLillo achieves at his most lyric. "When my mother died I felt expended, slowly, durably, over time. I felt suffused with her truth, spread through, as with water, color or light. I thought she'd entered the deepest place I could provide, the animating entity, the thing, the anything, that will survive my own last breath, and she makes me larger, she amplifies my sense of what it is to be human."
Defying time and space, the narrative is both exact and loose, as random as is to be expected of a writer whose interest has always been in character, dialogue, opposites, the moment and, increasingly, the image of that given moment. On many levels, Underworld is to the end of the American literary century what John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy was to its early decades. But while Dos Passos employed a more mundane collage technique involving the use of newspaper headlines and newsreel transcripts, DeLillo relies on images, linguistic sensations, fragmentary speech, his own word-camera.
Nick sits alone: "I had the baseball in my hand. Usually I kept the baseball on the bookshelves . . . You have to know the feel of a baseball in your hand, going back a while, connecting many things, before you can understand why a man would sit in a chair at four in the morning holding such an object, clutching it . . ." Conversational, at ease, Nick - "I lived in the real" - does not seem driven enough to be the anti-hero of an epic. But it is precisely through this detachment and lack of urgency, this essential randomness, that Underworld manages to provide an alternative, anti-heroic history. It is urgent without being driven.
DeLillo's The Names is a masterwork because it is about everything and nothing, is set everywhere and nowhere. Underworld achieves a similar artistic cohesion through its attention to specifics while also remaining random. DeLillo looks at the big issues of consumerism, weaponry, ethnic nuance, waste disposal, national paranoia - "You have to understand that all through the 1950s people stayed indoors. We only went outside to drive our cars . . . Because a threat was hanging in the air" - while also exploring the minutiae of ordinary, small lives. Stylish, humane, daring, this dazzling performance possesses wisdom and integrity to match its awesome technique, style and scale.