Underworld: Analysis of Major Characters

Author: Donald Richard DeLillo

First published: 1997

Genre: Novel

Locale: Bronx, New York; Phoenix, Arizona; a Jesuit school in Minnesota

Plot: Epic

Time: 1951 to the mid-1990s

Nick Shay, a guarded and quasimysterious figure, even to his own wife. Shay was born in the Bronx borough of New York City to Irish and Italian parents and grew up in an Italian neighborhood there during the 1950s. He is a “place-for-everything-and-everything-in-its-place” kind of guy. He works as an executive for a nuclear waste management company in Phoenix, Arizona, and derives an enormous amount of pleasure from sorting and naming the objects and trash in his life. He has two adult children. Sometimes, with his coworkers, Shay uses an old-timey gangster voice. Little do they know that his joke comes from his very real street-tough upbringing; Shay hates talking about his past. His father, Jimmy, a small-time bookie, disappeared in 1946, when Shay was a kid. Shay and his mother and brother all know that Jimmy simply walked out on them, but Shay clings to a story in which Jimmy was murdered by the mob. As a teenager in the Bronx in the 1950s, Shay is respected by his peers. He gets into fights, has several girlfriends, and plays pool with some local men. He is ambivalent about school and starts working at seventeen, taking menial jobs, such as lugging heavy cartons of soda. The same year he has a short-lived affair with Klara Sachs, the thought of which haunts him into adulthood, until they finally meet again in 1992. He shoots a man named George Manza in the summer of 1952. Because he is seventeen, Shay is tried as a minor and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Staatsburg, New York, and then transferred to a strict Jesuit school in Minnesota. The latter place instills in Shay a need for order and a love of Latin, which he will later teach off and on at a school. In his “punishment,” Shay finds his escape from the Bronx, and for the rest of his adult years, he is wary about returning.

Marian Bowman Shay, Nick's wife. She grew up in Wisconsin, near the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and met Nick while working at brokerage house in Chicago in the late 1960s. They married soon after. For much of their marriage, Marian is obsessed with staying physically fit, smokes compulsively, and is chronically unhappy. In the mid-1980s, she begins a loveless affair with Nick's unattractive coworker, Brian Glassic. She experiments with heroin but, in her late fifties and early sixties, settles into a more or less contented life with her husband's granddaughter.

Klara Sax, a well-known sculptor and artist born Klara Sachs. She marries Albert Bronzini in the 1950s and has a daughter named Teresa. When Klara is thirty-two, she has a brief affair with Nick Shay, who is, at the time, seventeen years old. After several afternoon encounters, she ends the relationship. Later, she leaves Albert and marries another man named Jason, who owns a yacht. She divorces him too and, in 1974, while struggling in her transition from painting on canvas to creating found object sculptures, she marries a wealthy man named Carlos Strasser, a European art collector. In the early 1990s, when Klara is in her early seventies, she is at the helm of a large-scale project at an old air force base somewhere deep in the desert between El Paso, Texas, and Phoenix, Arizona. She and her team of volunteers are painting a fleet of old bomber planes for a project called Long Tall Sally, named after an image of an awkward-looking young woman of the same name on the nose of one of the planes.

Albert Bronzini, Klara Sachs's first husband. He teaches high school science and tutors Matt Shay, Nick's younger brother, in chess. Though he is only in his thirties at the time, Albert embraces old age, and spends much of his time hanging out with neighborhood men twice his age or older. He loves the Bronx and continues to live there through the 1980s. After Klara leaves him, his sister Laura moves into his apartment. He dies of congestive heart failure in 1992.

Matthew “Matt” Aloysius Shay, Nick's younger brother. As a kid, he is known throughout the neighborhood as Matty, a chess prodigy, but the anguish of losing eventually causes him to give up the game altogether at the age of eleven. As an adult in 1974, he works in New Mexico on a secret Cold War weapons-testing operation called Pocket. He is ethically conflicted about the position and decides to move to Boston to be with Janet Urbaniak, a nurse who later becomes his wife.

Rosemary Shay, Nick and Matt Shay's mother. When her boys are young, she works in an office and does beading and tailoring work to support the family. The women in the neighborhood call her Rose, but she never corrects them. She continues to live in the Bronx through its decline in the 1970s and 1980s. In the early 1990s, Nick convinces her to move to Phoenix with him and his wife. She dies several years later.

George “the Waiter” Manza, a waiter in a restaurant in the Bronx in the 1950s. He has no friends to speak of, and Nick Shay, then a teenager, suspects that George the Waiter cannot read. Manza spends most of his time working and caring for his elderly mother, but he keeps a basement room in an apartment building where he occasionally sleeps with an unknown prostitute and shoots heroin. One day, when George and Nick are playing cards, George shows a handgun he found at work to Nick. Nick play-aims the gun at George and asks him if it is loaded. George says no; Nick pulls the trigger and kills him.

Sister Edgar, a nun and middle school teacher in the Bronx in the 1950s. She is obsessed with cleanliness and develops a reputation as a cruel and abusive teacher. As the years go by, she softens and stops beating her students. She retires but continues her work as a nun. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Bronx is literally burning. Sister Edgar sees enough horrific things to become jaded and cynical, but a rumored miracle captures her imagination. After a young girl named Esmeralda is raped and murdered, her face appears when the light of a passing train falls on a billboard. Sister Edgar is euphoric when she witnesses the event; she dies, happy, a few days later.

Cotter Martin, a young African American boy growing up in Harlem in the 1950s. On October 3, 1951, he hops the turn-stile at a New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers game. That day, Giants player Bobby Thompson hit a game-winning home run off of Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca to win the National League pennant in one of the most famous comebacks in baseball history. Cotter spots the coveted ball in the stands and, after a long tussle with a man named Bill Waterson, walks away with the prize.

Rose “Rosie” Meriweather Martin, Cotter's older sister. She is studious as a teenager and, later in her life, becomes an insurance adjustor. She lives in New York City and, in 1964, takes the bus down South to participate in a civil rights protest.

Manx Martin, Cotter and Rosie's father. He is a mercurial presence in his family's life. Cotter notes that while his mother bustles through the front door, effectively announcing her presence, his father simply slithers in and out without warning. Manx is perpetually broke and always looking to make a quick buck. After his son shows him the baseball, Manx decides to steal it from him while he is sleeping. Manx knows little about baseball, but he knows that someone might be willing to pay a lot of money for the ball. At Yankee Stadium, men and boys are lined up in the night to buy World Series tickets, and Manx finds a buyer in Charles Wainwright, an ad salesman and avid baseball fan.

Marvin Lundy, a baseball enthusiast living in New Jersey. He spends the better part of his adult life collecting memorabilia—to the detriment of his family life—and becomes obsessed with finding Thompson's home run ball. He pores over photographs, films, and newspaper clippings with zeal. Finally, he traces the ball to back to a woman named Genevieve Rauch and her dead husband, Judson Rauch, who was shot by the Texas Highway Killer. Lundy buys the ball, but later sells it to Nick Shay.

Charles Wainwright,anadsalesmanonMadisonAvenuein the 1950s and 1960s, during the era of the so-called Mad Men. He knows his son is untrustworthy, but he bequeaths the Thompson home run ball to him anyway.

Charles “Chuckie” Wainwright Jr., Charles Wainwright's son. Despite his privileged upbringing, he grows up to be a dropout, a drug addict, and a thief. He is also completely ambivalent about baseball; he loses the Thompson home run ball, his late father's most prized possession, in the shuffle following his divorce. In the 1960s, he turns his life around, and by 1969, he is navigating an airplane called Long Tall Sally—the same airplane that later inspires Klara Sax's massive painting—dropping bombs in Vietnam.

Ismael “Moonman 157” Muñoz, a graffiti artist. Muñoz is sixteen years old in 1974. He lives in the Bronx and is widely known, not by his person but by his graffiti tag, Moonman 157. With a team of young helpers, Muñoz can paint an entire subway car in under two nights. At one point, Klara's art dealer, Esther, tries to track him down to show his work in a gallery, but she is unsuccessful. Muñoz has sex with men in the subway tunnels, and by the 1980s and early 1990s, Sister Edgar, who works with Muñoz in the dilapidated section of the Bronx known as the Wall, suspects that he has AIDS, though this is never confirmed. As an adult, Muñoz and his young followers spray paint an angel for each child who dies in the Bronx on a brick wall.

Amy Brookhiser, Nick Shay's girlfriend in the late 1950s. It is clear that Nick feels more strongly about the relationship than she does. They go on a road trip together and maintain a half-hearted long distance relationship while Nick is working in California. In 1959, he accompanies her to Mexico, where she has an abortion.

Brian Glassic, Nick Shay's coworker at the waste management company. In the mid-1980s, he begins having an affair with Shay's wife, Marian. Shay finds out and confronts him on a business trip to Russia in the 1990s.