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.)
However, no DeLillo novel would is complete without the opportunity for target practice, for satire and irony aimed at an appealing bulls-eye. This author is the expert at picking subjects that almost satirize themselves. Do you remember the Hitler Studies professor in White Noise who couldn’t speak German? Well, we have more obvious targets in Underworld. DeLillo’s technique is to take the matter and anti-matter of culture and force it together to see what happens. In Underworld we have J. Edgar Hoover (that name, once full of sturm und drang, slowly becoming consigned to the world of comedy) obsessed with a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. We have a former juvenile delinquent growing up to be a successful executive in the field of garbage. We have acres of decommissioned military aircraft taken over by a tribe of avant garde painters, who hope to transform bombers into works of art. DeLillo delights in sharp, ridiculous contrasts, and they have become a trademark of his books.
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