The New Canon is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on great works of fiction published since 1985. These books represent the finest literature of the current era, and are gaining recognition as the new classics of our time. In this installment of The New Canon, Gioia looks at Underworld by Don DeLillo.
When The New York Times surveyed 124 writers and critics to determine the best work of American fiction during the last twenty-five years, Don DeLillo’s Underworld finished in second place with eleven votes. Only Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which received fifteen votes, ranked ahead of DeLillo’s massive 1997 novel.
Almost a half-century of history is crammed into Underworld, and the constant interaction of the diverging plot lines with pop culture events and socio-political milestones adds to the piquant flavor of this rambling novel. Underworld starts with a famous 1951 baseball game, when Giant Bobby Thomson hits a game-winning home run, the so-called “shot heard ‘round the world.” The book wraps up 827 pages later in cyberspace, where “everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered and linked, hyper-linked. . . . World without end, amen.”
DeLillo, for his part, steers clear of obvious links and hyperlinks in this massive work. Instead he jumps freely, and without warning, from vignette to vignette, character to character, decade to decade. DeLillo’s approach is essentially cinematic, based on masterfully conceiving and executing discrete scenes and making generous use of flashbacks. This large novel defies our expectations of linear narrative flow, and is instead built carefully, lovingly out of these isolated tableaus, each one possessing a drive and vitality of its own. DeLillo creates a unified whole through juxtaposition and contrast. To some extent, the chronology reverses the typical future-directed timeline of most fiction, and DeLillo himself has likened the structure of the book to the countdown to zero that precedes a missile or rocket launch
Occasionally DeLillo will hold on to a setting and situation at length, as in the opening ballgame narrative, which unfolds leisurely over sixty pages, and involves a wide cast of characters. But more often DeLillo presents brief, potent interludes of only a few pages, which he sets up and delivers with a sure touch, and quickly abandons for the next stop on our itinerary. DeLillo is the master of discontinuity, and the moment you start to settle into the narrative flow is just when you can count on a change in scenery.
But the cinematic quality of DeLillo’s writing is especially evident in his dialogue. No modern writer constructs more engaging conversations than Don DeLillo, and one would need to look to the film industry (Quentin Tarantino comes to mind) to find someone in his league. It’s not just clever repartee – heaven knows we hear enough of that on TV in mind-numbing thirty minute and sixty minute chunks. Rather it’s DeLillo’s rare ability to capture that strange moment when two people are communicating, but really aren’t; when they are talking past each other, engaging in conversations that are almost simultaneous soliloquies.
Yet DeLillo can also present old fashioned descriptive writing of the highest order. It may sound surprising, but my favorite passage in this book is several pages devoted to a description of the different components that make up a shoe. This section does little to advance the plot, but as you have probably picked up by now, this author is not overly concerned with pushing ahead a linear story line. Here DeLillo pauses from his other themes to demonstrate how a great writer can observe a wealth of details in something so banal that the rest of us would just ignore it. If I were picking assigned reading for creative writing students, this account of how to look at a shoe would be toward the top of the syllabus. (Philip Roth offers us a similarly brilliant interlude on the construction of gloves in American Pastoral. If I could find a few more of these I would consider compiling a whole wardrobe anthology.)
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