There is a sense of inevitability to Don DeLillo’s Underworld, discernible in the quiet grandiosity of his language, and with which he imbues his subject matter. Be it baseball, art or garbage, DeLillo invests all he touches in the novel with the significance of gods and demons, of grand battles and tumultuous sea voyages, or, in other words, with the essential qualities of an Homeric epic. This is a perfect example of one of those magical, mysterious creatures, the ever-elusive Great American Novel.
Only the worst of reviews revert to blurbs, so let’s leave an attempt at plot summary alone. Besides, as with all of my favourite books, the plot is, ultimately, a by-the-way – a vehicle, with which DeLillo exposes to us the world, human nature, truth… A bit like a parable, but without the burden of a stuffy, moralising message to round it out. This is being shown the world for the world’s sake, or, as it’s more often put, art for art’s sake.
Sweeping grace
DeLillo fuses reality with fiction, taking real events, places and people and filtering them into his invented world. This would perhaps be pigeonholed into some overspecified genre classification now (perhaps it was then), but ultimately it is evidence of a writer who is master of his craft, wielding reality as he saw fit. He telescopes between high and low registers with a sweeping grace, matched, arguably, only by Joyce in Ulysses: “It’s all part of the same thing. Rubens and Titian and Playtex and Motorola.”
One comes to understand that the interwoven lives depicted in the synecdochal New York of Underworld, are ones that need to be told. They are vital to our understanding of whence the world has come, since the Moderns, since WWII, since American-style free market capitalism became so ubiquitous that – for most of us, carrying on with our lives in its midst – its terrible effects (here, the endless piles of garbage), have become almost entirely invisible. Here, DeLillo does what all great artists do; he shows us to ourselves.
