One nation, undercover

"Underworld," Don DeLillo's ambitious attempt at the Great American Novel, prompts one to quote Henry James: "I liked all of it, except the whole thing."

By Laura Miller

Sep 26, 1997 | certainly this is a brilliant and impressive book, "Underworld," Don DeLillo's 11th novel and the story of over 50 years of American life, bracketed by a legendary baseball game in 1951 and a peculiar cyberspace epiphany in the present. Its subjects -- the bomb, popular culture, paranoia, crime, art, race, adultery, violence, consumerism and the staggering wastefulness of modern life -- are meaty and urgent. It has dazzling writing on every page and acute observations like "I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions ... pretending to be exactly who you are." It's a mesh of crisscrossing metaphors and reflected themes, as dense, shimmering and rich as any masterpiece.

And yet there's something vital missing from "Underworld"; like Henry James, complaining of another writer's effort, I'm prompted to say, "I liked all of it, except the whole thing." Because the book is so excellent (in the same way an individual used to be described as an "excellent man" or an "excellent woman") and so admirable, because it has so many strengths lacking in most other books published today, it feels a bit dastardly to point out its flaws. But those flaws (like everything else about "Underworld") seem so important that it wouldn't be proper, really, to let them pass unremarked.

"It's the 'Moby Dick' of our time," a smitten acquaintance said to me about "Underworld," and you get the impression that this is exactly what DeLillo intended from the moment he typed the first word. The book feels like it was conceived and gestated inside the very idea of Greatness (to use a DeLillo-esque turn of phrase). Perhaps when Melville sat down to thrash out his magnum opus, or Dostoevski to write "The Brothers Karamazov," each of those writers thought to himself, "I'm really on to something here," or even, "You know, this is really, really good." But "Underworld" has a self-reverent quality to it, as if DeLillo began it under the orders of a sonorous, Sir John Gielgudian voice that trumpeted from the heavens, proclaiming, "Thou shalt write the Great American Novel."

An exciting writer needs ambition, and most contemporary novelists don't reach far enough, but DeLillo's high seriousness tends to run amok. No wonder he was drawn to Lee Harvey Oswald, depicted in DeLillo's 1988 novel "Libra" as an oddball brooder intent on making history -- an ideal conjunction of writer and character.

Still, DeLillo's gravitas lets him write about pop culture's infiltration into our most intimate thoughts without sounding glib or trendy. Nick Shay, the alienated hero of "Underworld," contemplates the handsome lines of his wife's face, which reminds him of the woman's profile carved on bars of Camay soap, and the comparison doesn't feel vulgar because DeLillo's fundamentally incapable of vulgarity. When Nick examines the label on his sunblock and thinks, "I knew with total certainty that a protection factor of fifteen was the highest level of sunblock scientifically possible. Now they were selling me thirty," the moment elides gracefully into an anecdote about Edward Teller applying suntan lotion before witnessing the first atomic explosion -- rather than sounding like a Seinfeld routine.