The New Criterion

Heard in a club in San Francisco a week later, the audience full of aging dharma bums, the same material seems to land off to the side. The beats in the audience are ahead of Bruce when it comes to thinking the unthinkable:

The beats didn’t need a missile crisis to make them think about the bomb. The bomb was their handiest reference to the moral squalor of America, the guilty place of smokestacks and robot corporations, Time-magazined and J. Edgar Hoovered, where people sat hunched over cups of coffee in a thousand rainswept truckstops on a jazz prairie, secret Trotskyites and sad nymphomaniacs with Buddhist pussies—things Lenny made fun of. Lenny was showbiz, he was suited and groomed and cool and corrupt, the mortician-comic… .

It’s a nifty piece of pop criticism that DeLillo delivers, a personality analysis of the audience that sums up an entire social wave, the evocation of “rainswept truckstops on a jazz prairie,” a snapshot marriage of Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank (Kerouac having written the foreword to Frank’s The Americans). The Lenny Bruce sections showcase how attuned DeLillo is to the nervous system of every subculture he enters in Underworld, from swingers playing musical beds at a hotel to waste specialists talking shop. It’s a legacy from the New Journalism, this Silly Putty ability to shape-shift and imitate anyone at will. Some of the best scenes in Underworld are like day-glo passages from Tom Wolfe played on a black-and-white TV: social observation decolorized into a grainy monochrome of nostalgia. (“It is all falling indelibly into the past,” is how DeLillo describes the dying glory of that day at the Polo Grounds.) Where Wolfe is exhilarated by the coltish energies of capitalism, the giddy froth and reckless abandon, DeLillo (a less fun guy) is drawn to the dark, glacial agents of change—the submerged megatrends. Wolfe puts on fashion shows, DeLillo takes institutional readings. He can look at a glass tower and perceive that although it’s hooked to the world through faxes and modems, it inevitably becomes a citadel unto itself: “The corporation is supposed to take us outside ourselves. We design these organized bodies to respond to the market, face foursquare into the world. But things tend to drift dimly inward.”

For all its scanning of the horizon, Underworld also abdicates interest in what’s out there and begins to collect inward. A technocrat of literature, a didact despite his lab-goggle detachment, DeLillo seems to be making an instructional series on the many faces of anomie in Underworld; his own thoughts are free to circulate, but his characters seem stuck in whatever national mood is prevailing at the moment, like lost souls to flypaper. DeLillo applies such torturing attention to detail that, like other clinical overlords ( the director Stanley Kubrick comes to mind), he sometimes loses sight of the overall design; perfectionism becomes a way of blocking out other, larger, more organic problems. The result is a finely calibrated morass, a jumble of big set-pieces. One of the mantras of Underworld is “Everything connects” (e.g., “ ‘What do we know?’ Sims said. ‘That everything’s connected,’ Jesse said”), which turns out to be wishful thinking. A lot of elaborate foreplay comes to naught.

Ominous import, for instance, is accorded the private life and public mystique of the Texas Highway Killer, only to have him drop out of sight and rate a memory-jogging mention hundreds of pages later (“No one talks about the Texas Highway Killer anymore”). DeLillo’s re-creation of Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball in 1966, in which J. Edgar Hoover and his longtime sidekick Clyde Tolson function as a queeny Tweedledum and Tweedledee, is an imaginary portion of inside dish, a bitchy caricature that reads like Gore Vidal by way of Cindy Adams. A scene in a condom shop seems to be included only so DeLillo could do a virtuoso riff on the varieties of latex on display, ditto a similar routine on the distinctive properties of Jell-O. A religious miracle in which the image of a slain girl rises above a lake is a piece of magic realism that bears no relation to the rest of the book. I could cite other examples, but we’d be here all day. DeLillo’s novels have flubbed their plot expectations before— Running Dog succumbed to mystification; The Names was a complicated geopolitical thriller which couldn’t solve its own puzzle, and punted—but never this protractedly. The novel is so determined to be great, it can’t get out of its own way.

Underworld goes beyond the intellectual sovereignty of a godlike author, indulging in ponderous self-reflexive gamesmanship that seems like a fusion of man and computer. He seems to be parodying himself with his H.A.L.-like monotone on earthling behavior, as in a deadpan paragraph on the mystery of how people and baggage disperse so quickly from airports (“people with their separate and unique belongings, the microhistory of toilet articles and intimate garments”). Other times, it’s as if DeLillo can’t pull himself away from the pinball machine: he repeats himself as if ringing up a score. Time and again his Nick Shay recites his recycling ritual—“We do tin versus aluminum,” cans versus bottles, paper versus plastic; on and on like a rosary. Another character fixes himself a sandwich as if he were an alienated worker on the assembly line: “He spread the mayonnaise. He spread mayonnaise on the bread. Then he slapped the lunch meat down. He never spread the mayonnaise on the meat. He spread it on the bread. Then he slapped down the meat and watched the mayo seep around the edges.” Equally formalized and mechanical are some of the long exchanges of male dialogue, which have the budda-bing-budda-boom head bob of David Mamet or Martin Scorsese characters trying to punch their way out of a paper bag:

Muzz looked into the side mirror.

“You hit my bumpah you fuck.”

The guy said something.

“You trying to do?” Muzz said.

The guy spoke into his windshield.

“Tell him,” Nick said, “Where’d you get your license?”

Muzz put his head out the window but did not turn toward the car behind them.

“Where’d you get your license to drive that piece of shit?”

The guy said something into the windshield.

“Tell him Sears Roebuck or what?” Nick said.

Muzz looked into the mirror, his face an inch from the glass.

“Sears Roebuck you fuck?”

The light changed and people began to blow their horns.

That’s the last we see of Muzz, who has a manhole to crawl into somewhere.

Nick Shay is obviously DeLillo’s alter ego in the book—he does the most wisecracking when young, the most soul-searching when middle-aged, has the most mama-mia sex— and the startling aspect of Underworld is how much of a classic Bildungsroman it becomes after Bobby Thomson’s homer clears the wall. The epigrammatic brooding on waste, the Bomb, airport lobbies, and serial murder is really a thick smog cover for this portrait of the artist as a young punk. However far it roams, it ends up nosing around the old neighborhood. Born in 1936, DeLillo was raised in the Bronx, which is for him what Chicago was for James T. Farrell and Nelson Algren—the raw goods. Gritty, aggressive, even its name—Bronx—sounds like a brick hitting you on the head. Other cities seem painterly, the Bronx is pure photojournalism. Or as a nun in Underworld harangues a busload of tourists: “Brussels is surreal. Milan is surreal. This is real. The Bronx is real.”

T. S. Eliot said mankind cannot bear too much reality, and I must be unable to bear too much Bronx, because somewhere in the middle of DeLillo’s boyhood flashbacks I was out of my mind with boredom, trapped in a naturalistic rut of reading about dim bulbs making their nightly rounds:

There were a thousand sameshit nights when he played knock rummy with a guy named Fontana in Fontana’s father’s plumbing supply store, a nominal nickel a point, or shot a game of pool and had a slice of pizza at Half Moon with JuJu and Patsy, nights that always ended down, disappointed someway, and once he phoned Loretta from the candy store and told her he had his dick in his hand and studied the pause at the other end, knowing she was in the room with her mother, her brothers, her grandfather and who knows who else, and he went downstairs sometimes and stood smoking alone, late, in the doorway of Donato’s grocery, spitting occasional grains of tobacco into the wind.

So unwieldy and disjointed is Underworld that DeLillo has to manufacture an epiphany at the end—an ascension into cyberspace, the afterlife perceived as a murky hyperlink of everything ever written—to position some of the themes and characters into some sort of harmonic convergence. He uses rhetoric to wrap everything in a bow. “A word appears in the lunar milk of the data stream,” DeLillo announces, seated before a computer screen. His language lifts, he drops his customary cool, and his penultimate paragraph becomes a prose-poem which achieves a strained eloquence due more to its church-organ sonority than to its actual content. What is this word that “carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch”? Like Eliot offering benediction at the end of The Waste Land, DeLillo blesses his toxic wasteland with a simple word: “Peace.” It is more than a sacred note, it is a cosmic chord. The word gets a paragraph all to itself in the book.

Underworld’s final reverberation can’t rescue the novel from entropic rundown, although it’s understandable why its humble grandeur would leave most reviewers suitably wowed. Many of them wanted desperately to be wowed, having waited so long in the front lines of DeLillo fandom for mainstream readers to play catch-up. For decades DeLillo has accrued a rising dividend of goodwill for doing audacious imaginative, solid-integrity work (no slick-magazine slumming for him), and has benefited from the perception that although his books have been praised and awarded, he’s never really had the commercial breakthrough he deserved. White Noise did well, but it wasn’t whopping, like, say, Gravity’s Rainbow. Even Libra, DeLillo’s novel about Lee Harvey Oswald that many considered his most accessible, proved to be too literary for conspiracy buffs. A lot of money and promotional effort went into boosting Underworld onto the bestseller list. His publisher reportedly paid $1.3 million for English-language rights, and screen rights were sold for almost another million more. Vital to this marketing campaign was the participation of the famously reclusive and elusive DeLillo himself, a proud loner who was coaxed out of the phantom zone for this book to give readings, grant rare interviews, and have his grim picture taken. “A critic of consumerism gets the hard sell,” was the ironic subtitle Publisher’s Weekly gave to its article on the packaging of DeLillo. Of course, promotional muscle and a supine, panting press aren’t enough to put over a book—otherwise unsold copies of Robert Hughes’s widely hoopla’d American Visions wouldn’t be stacked into little forts in some bookstores.

No, the clue to the book’s commercial and critical success is embedded in its opening sentence. “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” The key word is “American.” Underworld addresses our fascination with ourselves, our collective self-preoccupation; it’s an American novel on American subjects for the American century that will soon stagger into the American millennium. The minimalism of Seventies and early Eighties fiction has been vanquished by this heavy-duty maximalism. Like Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Underworld undertakes a master surveyor’s summing-up of America as idea and ideal, an investigation of what makes America so unique and Faustian on the world stage. Because the country is so crowded, antic, and spacious, the books are crowded, antic, and spacious. (As if to out-do everyone, William T. Vollmann is said to be working on a novel so voluminous that it can’t find a publisher.) Underworld not only feeds this need for a guidebook to the tainted soul of America but, unlike the others, conveys a mood—a bluesy air of melancholy that reflects the battle fatigue left by a half-century of assassinations, nuclear buildup, and media barrage. The diagnosis of Underworld is that white, middle-aged, middle-class America is in the dumps literally and emotionally. The Soviet Union is flat on its back, but we’re dead on our feet. It’s a message that resonates with those who have experienced malaise ever since the Age of Aquarius went bust. “Underworld ends with a transcendent and redemptive act of grace,” veteran lefty and unreconstructed bleeding-hearter John Leonard writes in The Nation, adding, “While this astonishing novel may have earned it, America certainly hasn’t.” To the literary establishment, Underworld is the valedictory, the monumental tombstone, America deserves. But the best parts of the novel aren’t when DeLillo is courting the blues, but when he has Bobby Thomson at bat or Lenny Bruce on stage, and the writing turns jazzy. He’s like a teacher who departs from his lesson plan or a priest who strays from his sermon, and decides to wing it. His words fly. Then destiny calls, and it’s back to the doldrums.

Notes
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1. Underworld, by Don DeLillo; Scribner, 827 pages, $27.50. Go back to the text.