We're all a little afraid of huge novels, perhaps both awed and irritated at once. How can a book this massive be so brilliant as to be worth my time? On the other hand, wouldn't it be great to get embroiled in a novel you wish would never end, and know that for a long, long time -- it won't?
Underworld is a breakthrough novel for an already formidable writer. After many excellent books that have a tight focus -- from the pseudohistorical Libra to broadly satirical White Noise -- Underworld may shock the reader with its breadth. All the old themes are there, but now, on this huge canvas, he can play with all of them at once, explore their relationships, develop characters and ideas in new ways. The novel really does contain elements of almost all the preceding ones -- painfully researched history, unifying metaphors, merciless deadpan humor, and characters drawn with bright, sharp lines. On the surface, Underworld seems to be held together by nothing more than the history of late 20th Century America, a theme that most English teachers might critique as "a little too broad." This hugeness of theme explains why some have criticized the book as disorganized, a "notebook" or "grab bag". Read closer, though, and more openly, and you'll see that DeLillo knows what he's doing.
The book's postmodernisms are manifest. The structure interleaves fragments surrounding a 1951 Yankees-Dodgers game with seven long sections that fall backward through time from 1992 to the 1950s. Each section has its own formal rules that suit its mood. Some tell one linear story, while others jump around in a particular scene. One consists entirely of fragments scattered throughout 1955-69 period, all orbiting around the centroid of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This reverse-chronological structure may be disorienting, but it is much more conventional and digestible than the random time-jumping of many comparable novels, such as Wallace's Infinite Jest or Halprin's Memoirs from Antproof Case. Whereas Wallace and Halprin jump around in time to confuse cause and effect, DeLillo moves backward through time in seven large and deliberate steps. We meet characters first late in life and then progressively earlier, until we reach a climax formed of first causes lying in childhood and adolescence. Time moves backwards reliably, predictably, like clockwork.
If anything, the reversed structure makes time even more ominous than it is in a conventional narrative. While the book is full of brilliantly drawn characters, none of them is as large as history itself. We never experience any character outside the context of a time and place. De Lillo's characters are profoundly different at different ages, and much of the book is about how they grapple with the impossible enemy of time. The final words of the Prologue, when DeLillo fades out of the 1951 ballgame and jumps forward to 1992, speak for the whole book: "It's all falling irrevocably into the past."
This book is not for everyone. If, like Aristotle, you want a story with a "beginning, middle, and end", you will hate this book, as several reviewers apparently do. If you're open to exploring history like a museum, and if you can handle routine museumlike shocks such as suddenly emerging from Renaissance Italy into Pharaonic Egypt, then you can probably handle DeLillo's time-shifting structure. If you do, you may find it as engrossing as any huge novel you've ever wished would never end.
A gloriously fused history of the past 50 years that offers a key to understanding American culture, Underworld moves through the nation s diverse lan...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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