Underworld, by Don DeLillo: ***1/2

At one point, in the fall of 1999, I was trying to decide whether I wanted to buy Infinite Jest or Underworld, and I ultimately decided to go with Wallace's novel because it was longer by a couple of hundred pages; at the time, I was looking for the longest book I could find. (I didn't have a TV, and I was living in a brand new city where I didn't know anyone, so I was reading a lot and figured I could keep costs down by buying books that took me a long time to read. Plus, I like epics.) Underworld is still over 800 pages, but it's not 1100. Anyway, this book ultimately took me longer to read than IJ, because I read it a year later, with TV and girlfriend by then in my apartment. Anyway, this was the only book I read in the fall of 2000, but I was very busy.

It is stunning book, though, and features a scope and breadth much like those found in the best fantasy novels, even though this instead features very real, very American characters living between 1950 and 1990. It would be easy to say that the book follows the lives of its two main characters for a series of years in the second half of the twentieth century (as it does on the back of the book jacket), but that would be simplifying things quite a bit. This book is complicated, includes a lot of characters, and yet has virtually no point, plot or purpose other than to trace the history of a baseball. But it's beautifully written, and the characters sparkle with life. Amazingly, the book jumps substantially backwards in time from situation to situation and character to character, seemingly making no real effort to be comprehensible, and yet it is, perfectly so.

[Two years after reading this, I find that my impressions of mid-century America have become the images DeLillo portrayed in this book. Something about the character of his writing has embedded these images and ideas in my mind. It so eloquently renders these perfectly American situations - going to the theater in New York, trash collecting, conversations about baseball - that I think about it much more than probably any book that I've read in the last few years. In reality, it has shaped how I think about American history, especially since I didn't live in the 50s and 60s, so that when I hear things about that time, I create the situations in my mind with my understanding of this book. I don't want to overstate this - I'm not seeing everything in the world through Underworld-colored glasses - but it occurs to me often. It has really stuck with me. - winter 2003]

Quotes:
pg. 177 - "Brian was shamed by other men's obsessions. They exposed his own middling drift, the voice he heard, soft, faint, and far away, that told him not to bother."

pg. 427 - "Will we actually be able to sit through it... or is it one of those things where we have to be reverent because we're in the presence of greatness but we're really all sitting there determined to be the first ones out the door so we can get a taxi?" [in reference to going to watch an Eisenstein film]

pg. 667 - "The butcher stood at the corner of the window looking well-placed among the dangling animals, his arms crossed and feet spread. Bronzini saw an aptness and balance here. The butcher's burly grace, watch him trim a chop, see how he belongs to the cutting block, to the wallow of trembling muscle and mess - his aptitude and ease, the sense that he was born to the task restored a certain meaning to these eviscerated beasts. Bronzini thought the butcher's own heart and lungs ought to hang outside his body, stationed like a saint's to demonstrate his intimate link to the suffering world."

pg. 806 - "I'll tell you what I long for, the days of disarray, when I didn't give a damn or a farthing or a fuck."

pg. 809 - "Maybe we feel a reverence for waste, for the redemptive quality of the things we use and discard."

pg. 810 - "I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself."
(fall 2000)

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