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brandonpytel 's review for:
Underworld
by Don DeLillo
Underworld soars through the second-half of the 20th Century, much like the baseball smacked by Bobby Thompson that provides the fantastic 50-ish page opening for the book: In this intro, we follow the characters through the chaos — from the kids jumping the turnstiles, to the celebrities in the stands, to J. Edward Hoover hearing about the Soviet test bomb for the first time — all in an effort to locate the origin of the home-run ball once it left the park.
Underworld really earns it stripes in its postmodern nature, a sort of cacophony of major events that take place after the dropping of the first atomic bomb and everything it leads to:
“Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits… violence is undone, violence is easier now, it’s uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values.”
On its surface, Underworld follows the trajectory of Thompson’s historic home run, as it exchanges hands from person to person, each with their own background, until it eventually lands in the hands of Nick Shay, whose backstory is just as interesting as anyone before him.
“Their stories would be exalted, absorbed by something larger, the long arching journey of the baseball itself and his owne cockeyed march through the decades.”
Shay is constantly mourning the disappearance of his father, who left for a pack of lucky strikes (one of the many brands that harken to an earlier age of ad men) and never returned. In his mind, Shay envisions his father disappearing in a more heroic way, say through the Mafia, but that is unlikely the case.
But Shay’s real grounding in this work is his occupation as a seller of waste. It’s perhaps the most obvious metaphor for the book, waste and waste management: “Garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste… it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art music, mathematics.
This waste management defines the postmodern age, whether that be the booming population with unnecessary products spilling into landfills, or the constant bombardment of television advertisements and product pushing and news dumping that turn our brains into mush.
“When [the TV] was running he could not turn away from it. When it wasn’t running he never thought about it.”
And it sheds light on Klara Sax’s fantastic project in the Mojave Desert, turning old B-52s and other waste into an art form: “we took junk and saved it for art. Which sounds nobler than it was. It was just a way of looking at something more carefully. And I’m still doing it, only deeper maybe.”
It’s this overlap with art and war, with weapons of mass-destruction both in secret and out in the open, that is the constant push-and-pull contradiction that makes up both Underworld and the post-WW2 societies we’ve created. In that way, it’s a perfect complement to Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s postmodern masterpiece, which in many ways led to the themes of the Underworld — a mess of noise swimming in its own mass-produced shit.
Underworld is so many things, a paranoid puzzle that takes place adjacent to the Cuban Missile Crisis, an escape into the nostalgia of the past through its obsessions with baseball, a superstitious conspiracy with the constant, if illogical, surfacing of 13, and above all a reckoning with the world we created — one that is atomically violence and threatening, with radioactive garbage piling up around us, what is one to do with it all, besides make money like Nick or make art like Klara?
And this book is about what we do with what’s leftover from such a chaotic half-century: Waste is a “dark multiplying byproduct… the devil twin. Because waste is the secret history, the understory… What we excrete comes back to consume us.”
And the baseball, perhaps, is a stand in for waste’s opposite, “an expensive and beautiful object that I keep half hidden, maybe because I tend to forget why I bought it… a beautiful thing smudged green near the Spalding trademark nand bronzed with nearly half a century of art and sweat and chemical change, nad I put it back and forget it until next time.”
A perfectly imperfect metaphor for both the latter 20th century and this book.
Underworld really earns it stripes in its postmodern nature, a sort of cacophony of major events that take place after the dropping of the first atomic bomb and everything it leads to:
“Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits… violence is undone, violence is easier now, it’s uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values.”
On its surface, Underworld follows the trajectory of Thompson’s historic home run, as it exchanges hands from person to person, each with their own background, until it eventually lands in the hands of Nick Shay, whose backstory is just as interesting as anyone before him.
“Their stories would be exalted, absorbed by something larger, the long arching journey of the baseball itself and his owne cockeyed march through the decades.”
Shay is constantly mourning the disappearance of his father, who left for a pack of lucky strikes (one of the many brands that harken to an earlier age of ad men) and never returned. In his mind, Shay envisions his father disappearing in a more heroic way, say through the Mafia, but that is unlikely the case.
But Shay’s real grounding in this work is his occupation as a seller of waste. It’s perhaps the most obvious metaphor for the book, waste and waste management: “Garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste… it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art music, mathematics.
This waste management defines the postmodern age, whether that be the booming population with unnecessary products spilling into landfills, or the constant bombardment of television advertisements and product pushing and news dumping that turn our brains into mush.
“When [the TV] was running he could not turn away from it. When it wasn’t running he never thought about it.”
And it sheds light on Klara Sax’s fantastic project in the Mojave Desert, turning old B-52s and other waste into an art form: “we took junk and saved it for art. Which sounds nobler than it was. It was just a way of looking at something more carefully. And I’m still doing it, only deeper maybe.”
It’s this overlap with art and war, with weapons of mass-destruction both in secret and out in the open, that is the constant push-and-pull contradiction that makes up both Underworld and the post-WW2 societies we’ve created. In that way, it’s a perfect complement to Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s postmodern masterpiece, which in many ways led to the themes of the Underworld — a mess of noise swimming in its own mass-produced shit.
Underworld is so many things, a paranoid puzzle that takes place adjacent to the Cuban Missile Crisis, an escape into the nostalgia of the past through its obsessions with baseball, a superstitious conspiracy with the constant, if illogical, surfacing of 13, and above all a reckoning with the world we created — one that is atomically violence and threatening, with radioactive garbage piling up around us, what is one to do with it all, besides make money like Nick or make art like Klara?
And this book is about what we do with what’s leftover from such a chaotic half-century: Waste is a “dark multiplying byproduct… the devil twin. Because waste is the secret history, the understory… What we excrete comes back to consume us.”
And the baseball, perhaps, is a stand in for waste’s opposite, “an expensive and beautiful object that I keep half hidden, maybe because I tend to forget why I bought it… a beautiful thing smudged green near the Spalding trademark nand bronzed with nearly half a century of art and sweat and chemical change, nad I put it back and forget it until next time.”
A perfectly imperfect metaphor for both the latter 20th century and this book.