Don DeLillo's "Underworld" is this year's big novel, but it may not be a novel for everyone. "Underworld" is big in every way -- 827 pages long, spanning four decades of Cold War American history, crowded with characters ranging from nuns to waste management specialists, from conceptual artists to Jell-O artists. It has the heft and sprawl of a James Michener or James Cavell sage -- except that it turns on its head every convention of that style of book.
DeLillo opens on Oct. 3, 1951, the day Bobby Thomson hit a home run to clinch the pennant for the Giants, the same day the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb. These accidentally twinned events establish the link between history and popular culture that DeLillo traces through 40 years of paranoia, fervor, and disarray.
Words such as "trace" and "link" barely describe this novel's backward movement and artfully discombobulated structure, a method of storytelling summed up by the title of one of the middle sections:
"BETTER THINGS FOR BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY: Selected Fragments Public and Private in the 1950s and 1960s."
"Underworld" begins with a black teenager sneaking into the ball park -- Cotter, the boy who will eventually take home the ball that Thomson hits. DeLillo then shifts to the box shared that day by Toots Shor, Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra and J. Edgar Hoover, spans the stadium, takes in Russ Hodges' commentary, offers quick glimpses into the mood of the individual players.
During the game Hoover is called aside to be told of the Russian bomb. Paper rains down from the stands, and Edgar, as DeLillo calls him, is mesmerized by a Life Magazine reproduction of Bruegel's "The Triumph of Death."
Weaving back and forth, DeLillo creates an American panorama, a landscape realistically detailed and at the same time symbolically fraught. The ball Thomson hits becomes a talisman that reappears again and again in the novel. Different characters own it, pay significant sums of money to buy it, or a ball they think might be it, one man devotes years to tracking it down. It is a symbol of fate, chance, the reversals of destiny, and at the same time an artifact of that hypercharged, overblown, frantically unwinding "people's history" that DeLillo has chronicled with such mad and improbable humor now through 11 novels.
"Underworld" is, I'm sorry to say, an uneven book, or maybe just too loosely constructed for my particular taste. Its conception is brilliant, and many sequences, especially this opening section, are wonderfully achieved. But around page 400 or so I found my interests flagging, the relentless sprawl of the narrative cumulatively wearying. Everything seems to fit -- four Lenny Bruce nightclub monologues during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Truman Capote's 1966 Black and White Ball, the 1965 New York blackout, plus some terrific-sounding Jell-O recipes, plus several short stories DeLillo's published separately over the past several years.
