‘Underworld’ Alarmingly Literary, Imaginative

“Underworld” by Don DeLillo (Scribner, 827 pages, $27.50)

The real question posed by the publication of Don DeLillo’s “Underworld” is not if this is the great DeLillo novel everyone has been anticipating, but if it is the Great Novel, period.

Review copies were accompanied by a letter from its publisher saying it would be “presumptuous” to attempt to define “Underworld,” implying that such an endeavor could only be demeaned by the usual hype.

It may be, however, that the letter writer was daunted by the prospect of having to describe a book that is either the secret history of a half-century of media manipulations, covert cabals and hidden agendas, pasts and desires, or an acknowledgement that routinely lived lives and unjustifiable injustices breed mystery and conspiracy and perversion, both literally and imaginatively.

Like DeLillo’s earlier novels, “Underworld” is almost frighteningly literary and imaginative, filled with repetition and revelation. This time, though, his post-modern meditations on paranoia cast an undeniable spiritual shadow. Lurking amid all the industrial waste, between the subway trains covered in graffiti, beneath the seams of a legendary baseball that has been stolen and bartered and idealized like America itself, is nothing less than salvation.

This being DeLillo, arriving there is something of a magical mystery tour; information is disseminated on a need-to-know basis, but the panorama is spectacular. Like previous DeLillo novels, this one has its inspiration in a photograph, one that took the author to New York’s Polo Grounds on Oct. 3, 1951, when Bobby Thomson drove a line drive into the lower deck of the left field stands, sending Giants announcer Russ Hodges into screaming delirium - “The Giants win the pennant and they’re going crazy” - and the actual horsehide itself into the Cold War underworld of bomb shelters, racial tension, red-baiting, Jell-O molds and modern art.

Living through most of this is Nick Shay, whom we meet first in 1992, in the desert, on his way to a reunion with Klara Sax, an old acquaintance from the Bronx neighborhood. Nick, in his late 50s, is now a waste consultant who lives a quiet life in a suburb of Phoenix - “like someone in a witness protection program.”

Klara, 15 years his senior, is in the desert overseeing construction of her latest conceptual art piece, which Nick has read about in Time. It involves the painting of abandoned military aircraft, Cold War waste. When Nick was 17 and Klara, then Clara Sachs Bronzini, was 32, they had an extremely brief affair, an erotic interlude. A secret.

Nick has other secrets. Not so much secrets, really, as just things he doesn’t or can’t talk about. One is that he is the owner of the Bobby Thomson home run ball, the ultimate item of sports memorabilia, presumed lost to the ages. The story of how that ball came into Nick’s possession takes up a good portion of “Underworld’s” first half, but if the ball is the book’s MacGuffin, the item that leads us in and out of American culture, back and forth and in the present and the in-between, it would also seem to represent DeLillo’s belief in old-fashioned fiber, its stitching and uniformity and usefulness.

DeLillo finds that, too, in his loving descriptions of Bronx barbershops and tar roofs, where boys can listen to playoff games on plastic radios and sneak puffs on Luckies and ponder whether a bookie father simply walked out on the family or was whisked away under mysterious circumstances. It is the difference between a bad break and bad business, and the bad business can inevitably be found in “Underworld’s” interconnected tunnels.

It is there we view, repeatedly, a video, accidentally captured by a little girl, of a driver being murdered by the Texas Highway Killer. It is there we see Nick’s wife sharing heroin with her lover, Nick’s best friend. It is there that bombs are tested and eyes are burnt and flesh is scarred. And the tunnels have not been newly dug. They were there in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, too, sucking up the rats who betrayed the neighborhood code; sucking up the joy in the life of Nick’s little brother Matt, the chess whiz; sucking out the spirit of Lenny Bruce, who arrives on stage to provide a kind of running commentary to much of “Underworld’s” second half before OD’ing on junk, prescient paranoia and self-loathing.

Bruce’s antithesis, J. Edgar Hoover, also plays a large role in “Underworld,” starring in what is perhaps the book’s most dazzling set piece, Truman Capote’s famous Black and White Ball of the early ‘60s. This and various other chapters of “Underworld” are so fully developed they easily stand on their own. (And have: This chapter appeared earlier in the New Yorker, and others were published in Harper’s, Antaeus and Esquire.)

But if “Underworld” is less contained, and containable, than “Libra” and “Mao II,” it is something much more than the literary equivalent of a rock concept album, in which the songs have been connected by contrived, post-facto references. It piles up its cultural images and endgame experiences like photographs, then lines them up like Klara Sax’s bombers, instruments of death transformed, by impulse and desire, into art.

Then DeLillo allows us the serious but somehow wonderfully enjoyable responsibility of sorting it out into our own reality, deciding whether the number 13 has any real significance, whether the image of a slaughtered innocent can really be illuminated by the lights of a subway train on billboard, whether the horror of a secret past can be absolved by the sound of “small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor’s yard, kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice….”

If “Underworld” is a Great Novel, and it is, it is because DeLillo speaks in ours.