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Rising above the rot >> Don Delillo's Underworld merits the hype by JULIET WATERS
It's a title that creates expectations of tons of moral rot, and probably a dense mob epic. Expectations that will be strengthened in the first chapter, when we meet Frank Sinatra, watching the last game of the 1951 New York GiantsBrooklyn Dodgers pennant race, just a few seats away from J. Edgar Hoover. So I feel it's only fair to warn summer readers right now that Delillo's Underworld has nothing to do with the mob. And that the book is about as far as one could possibly get from your average paperback full of "moral rot." The title actually refers to the long lost Sergei Eisenstein film, Unterwelt, a plotless, barren and surreal epic that has definite parallels with Delillo's post-mortem of the American psychic landscape. Sinatra disappears after the first chapter, though Hoover will make a return appearance later. And the Giants vs. Dodgers game forms the backdrop for a symbolic link between baseball and the Cold War. For those few who aren't familiar with one of the most famous games in the history of American baseball, this was the game where Bobby Thomson's ninth inning home run became known in contemporary popular culture as "the shot heard around the world." But even your average baseball fanatic might not know two pieces of trivia about that game. First, that the ball Thomson hit was never found; and second, that the game took place on the same day Russia tested its first atomic bomb. The plot--if you can call it that--of Underworld is loosely stitched around a fictional trajectory of the missing ball through four decades of American history. We learn that the ball was scooped up in the stands by Cotter Martin, a Harlem kid who jumped the turnstile to get in to the game, and that it was taken from him by his creepy father Manx Martin with the intention of selling it. We also learn that in 1992 the ball is owned by Nick Stash. When we first meet Stash in '92 he is in his mid-50s and is visiting Klara Sax, a famous American artist in her 70s and a lover from Stash's very complicated past. Sax is currently creating a massive installation project that involves painting abandoned military aircraft. Stash is a specialist in radioactive waste management. Sax and Stash are only two out of a virtual stadium of characters that populate Underworld, but somehow it's obvious that the couple form the novel's moral epicentre. Stash in particular emerges as the central character, and if the novel has one serious failure it's that Delillo doesn't give more room to Sax. It's disappointing partly because she is such a brilliantly drawn character, and partly because her integrity and independence is a relief as a counterpoint to the mid-life moral malaise of most of the other characters. Nevertheless, despite the complicated bleakness of the novel, Underworld pretty much earns the serious praise it's received in the last year. It's been called a masterpiece, and received over-the-top acclaim from writers such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, William Boyd and Michael Ondaatje. It's beautifully written, in a prose style that is unerringly lucid and effortless to read. While its structure is fragmented and post-modern, Underworld has a strong moral centre that holds all the pieces together and makes the book worth the intellectual effort. If anything, Underworld made me realize how long it's been since I've read an American novel that really blew me away. And also how long it's been since I've felt that weird longing I very rarely have to be American. It's a feeling I only get after something, usually a book, confronts me with what a huge, complicated, hypnotizing mess contemporary America is. And Delillo certainly shoves your nose right in it. In the end Underworld is more a page savourer than a page turner. For a particular kind of summer reader it may be the only book they need to buy this season. Underworld by Don Delillo, Scribner, pb., 829 pp, $22.50
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"Lots of moral rot," says one character in Don Delillo's Underworld, "that's what people read in the summer." Given this fact, lots of summer readers may be tempted just from the title to buy Delillo's 800-page bestseller, now that it's out in paperback.