Underworld by Don DeLillo

First published: 1997

Type of plot: Postmodernism

Time of work: The Cold War and immediate post-Cold War eras

Locale: New York City, Phoenix, a reform school in Minnesota, and post-Soviet Kazakhstan

Principal Characters:

• Nick Shay, a middle-aged waste-management professional of urban, working-class origins
• Marian Shay, Nick’s wife
• Matt Shay, Nick’s brother
• Klara Sax, an experimental artist, Nick’s first lover
• Albert Bronzini, Klara’s first husband and Matt’s former chess tutor
• Manx Martin, the father of Cotter Martin, whose son caught Bobby Thomson’s historic 1951 playoff home run
• Brian Glassic, Nick’s coworker, who is having an affair with Marian
• Sister Edgar, a nun working with homeless squatters in the lower Bronx
• Ismael Muñoz, the leader of the squatters

The Novel

Underworld is divided into eleven parts: six narrative sections, a prologue, an epilogue, and three sections narrated from the perspective of Manx Martin. Each section is marked by nonchronological shifts among times and locales, beginning with the onset of the Cold War and culminating in the post-Cold War 1990’s. DeLillo links the Soviet Union’s first detonation of an atomic device, on October 3, 1951, with the famous Brooklyn Dodgers-New York Giants baseball playoff game that occurred on the same date. This connection between a sports game and a geopolitically dramatic weapons test—two “shots heard ’round the world,” in the parlance of the times—becomes the central reference point for the actions, conflicts, and intersections of characters in the novel.

The novel is narrated from the points of view of all of its major characters, and it shifts intermittently between first-person and third-person narration. Underworld begins at the famous Dodgers-Giants playoff. DeLillo’s interconnection of both “shots heard ’round the world” is clear from the outset, because one of the celebrity spectators attending the game is Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover hears news from an aide of the atomic test just before Bobby Thomson comes to bat. Moments later, as outfield fans scuffle for the game-winning home-run ball, Hoover considers the possibilities of the new age just inaugurated by the Soviet test. Hoover’s historically documented disdain for governmental authority dominates the narration as streamers fly, crowds pour into the streets, and the United States and Soviet Union accelerate the Cold War.

Thomson’s home-run ball is caught by Cotter Martin, who skipped school that day to attend the game. Cotter’s father, Manx Martin, looking for a fast buck to pay surmounting debts, eventually steals the ball from his son and searches for a buyer. The location of the ball never can be fully verified after Manx’s theft. From there on, the novel’s trajectory is as discontinuous as that of the ball. Each new section of the novel is framed by the unpredictable, fragmented history of where the ball landed in the world of sports-souvenir hawkers. It is revealed early in the narration that Nick paid more than thirty thousand dollars for the ball to a New York collector, Marvin Moser, who spent his life researching the ball’s whereabouts. As meticulous as Moser’s research is, he admits he cannot account for all of the links in the chain of owners. Thus, even Nick’s eventual ownership is in dispute.

The subjective, unverifiable history of the ball becomes a microcosm for the fragmented histories and identities of the persons and nations in Underworld. The primary narrative voices of the novel reappear in the epilogue, collapsed into endlessly hyperlinked information on Internet sites. The placement of these voices inside cyberspace but outside of the human cities that have defined them is not dystopian, despite the novel’s move away from the human and toward the technological. Nevertheless, the ending is less than comforting. This epilogue, entitled “Das Kapital” after Karl Marx’s famous work, dramatizes the overwhelmingly consumerist emphasis of post-Cold War American life. The novel culminates in one final word that could articulate the end of the human struggle of the Cold War and inaugurate something new for the post-Cold War era; this final word is “Peace.” Yet peace is unsettling, because the novel traces the rise of what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” and its transformation into something of a consumer-industrial complex. The peace achieved at the end of the novel is uneasy, and it comes at the price of a culture that has absorbed human individuality and choice into consumerist commodities.

The Characters

DeLillo’s novel portrays its characters as products of their place and era, instead of independent individuals outside of conflicts of history. Nick Shay’s life is central to all events and conflicts in Underworld. Young Nick swaggers and speaks a post-World War II Italian-American Bronx vernacular, yet in Arizona, some thirty years later, Nick is almost contrite; his sentences, like the desert landscape itself, are ordered, reflective, sparse. In Kazakhstan, where he confronts Brian Glassic about his affair with Nick’s wife, Marian, and where his waste company engages in black-market commerce, Nick’s language reverts to his Bronx days. Here, like the dark, cold landscape of this black-market transaction and confrontation with Brian, Nick’s actions and words are clipped, aggressive, and grammatically unstructured.

Klara Sax is an experimental artist whose development in the novel from middle-class urban housewife to avant-garde icon is central to the novel’s focus on how the Cold War era loosed human possibility at the same time that it sought to constrain it. In the 1950’s, Klara is Albert’s dutiful housewife, caring for an apartment and daughter while Albert teaches school and tutors chessplayers after school. Her paintings are a serious hobby, but she does not seek an audience outside of her circle of friends. As American life becomes less structured and less rigid for women in the 1960’s, Klara’s life, too, opens up. She and Albert divorce; she becomes active in experimental art circles and the antiwar movement. As experimentalism becomes less dangerous and more assimilated in the 1990’s, Klara is an aging icon. She is the subject of television documentaries, and she maintains a coterie of young art students who help produce her most stunning work to date, a collection of retired warplanes painted, ornamented, and patterned against the backdrop of the Arizona desert.

Albert Bronzini’s character development also mirrors movements and changes in Cold War American culture, yet his changes, unlike Klara’s, are framed by decay and neglect. Albert’s life is careful and stratified. In the 1950’s, he maintained a quiet, bookish existence as a teacher and scholar in his thriving Bronx neighborhood. With his neighborhood becoming increasingly inhospitable at the end of the century, however, Albert spends his final days shuttling back and forth to the apartments of aging neighbors and sitting alone in the park drinking.

Sister Edgar responds to urban decay with obsessive gestures of cleanliness. She washes her hands incessantly and transforms her apartment into a fortress against germs. As a product herself of the Cold War, Sister Edgar associates the threat of germs with Cold War communism. Just as germs exist in infinite multiplicities— Sister Edgar overbleaches her clothes but wonders how she can be sure the bleach bottle itself is clean—so too does her urban world decay in an infinite multiplicity. Ironically, her greatest contact with the outside world is Ismael Muñoz, a squatter to whom she delivers charity food. Muñoz is infected with the AIDS virus, yet he is Sister Edgar’s primary contact in her quest to deliver food to the Bronx’s most-neglected residents and homeless. In return for money to restock her church’s food pantry, Sister Edgar and her assistant, Sister Grace, provide Muñoz with the locations of abandoned cars that he and fellow squatters can strip for parts. Thus, as much as Sister Edgar’s world revolves around order and cleanliness, her primary human contacts live in misery, crime, and neglect.

Critical Context

Like all DeLillo’s work, the novel focuses on the heroism and madness that occurs when the individual is placed in both congruity and conflict with the crowd. Like Libra (1988), DeLillo’s fictionalized treatment of Lee Harvey Oswald and the John F. Kennedy assassination, Underworld attempts to assert the individual onto the collective history. In Underworld, DeLillo explores how nationalism, war, and peace ultimately trickle down into the private lives and conflicts of ordinary people, and how the lives and conflicts of these people produce a collective history.

As a postmodern novel, Underworld blurs the boundary between individuals and multitudes. By asserting that the consistent frame of reference in a novel is fragmented rather than solid, as it otherwise would be in a realist novel, a postmodern novelist aims to portray characters and conflicts in a state of orderly chaos. Moreover, the postmodern novelist aims to enact this chaos in the experience of reading a postmodern novel. The danger in such an approach, especially as manifested in Underworld, is that identification with characters and conflicts becomes difficult for readers when the chaos of a novel’s subject matter is enacted in the experience of reading. DeLillo’s past work demonstrates that he is comfortable in this arena of fragmentation and orderly chaos. In Underworld, he keeps the danger of fragmentation in the offing as he explores moments in history that defy the easy rationalizations that a solid, solitary narrator would offer. Thus, solitary action is never fully noble in Underworld; those who manage waste also work the black market, and the truly religious, such as Sister Edgar, perceive the world through paranoid eyes.

Bibliography

Begley, Adam. “Don DeLillo: Americana, Mao II, and Underworld.” Southwest Review 82, no. 4 (1997): 478-505. Argues that language is the foundation for DeLillo’s explorations of future constructions of the self in relation to collective history. For Begley, DeLillo’s careful attention to the role of language in the construction of selfhood makes DeLillo an important voice in twentieth century fiction.

Keesey, Douglas. Don DeLillo. New York: Twayne, 1993. Useful introduction to major themes and techniques in DeLillo’s work. Includes relevant biographical material and discussions of DeLillo’s fiction through 1992.

LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. The first full-length commentary on DeLillo’s work. LeClair examines DeLillo’s fiction through an interdisciplinary focus that includes the humanities and natural sciences.

Lentricchia, Frank, ed. Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. Collection of essays by different critics working from a cultural studies approach to DeLillo’s fiction.

Nadeau, Robert. “Don DeLillo.” Readings from the New Book on Nature: Physics and Metaphysics in the Modern Novel. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. Considers DeLillo’s fiction in light of recent convergences between science and philosophy.

Tanner, Tony. “Afterthoughts on Don DeLillo’s Underworld.” Raritan 17, no. 4 (Spring, 1998): 48-71. Argues that Underworld’s major flaw is that the brilliant interconnectedness of characters, themes, and social commentary in DeLillo’s previous novels is largely absent in Underworld. Tanner asserts that DeLillo mistakenly deemphasizes novelistic treatments of history in favor of random, disconnected prose news items in Underworld.