Today I started Underworld: A Novel
The opening scene is riveting. A Giants game. 1951. A little black kid leaps over the turnstiles. Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover are in the stands. They appear to be characters in the book. We go through the game, play by play. But there are other events afoot … the little black kid hides in the stands, he really wanted to see the game, he is afraid of being busted … Because of his “crime”, and because the only other black person around appears to be a peanut-vendor, he feels that his blackness radiates out from him.
But it’s really how Don DeLillo paints the scene that gives it its scope … It’s odd – he just tells about night baseball games or people getting off subways – and he makes it seem like he is describing some universal truth.
For example, this is the third paragraph of the book:
Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day — men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.
And here is his description of a night-game:
The arc lights come on, catching Cotter by surprise, causing a shift in the way he feels, in the freshness of his escapade, the airy flash of doing it and not getting caught. The day is different now, grave and threatened, rain-hurried, and he watches Mays standing in center field looking banty in all that space, completely kid-size, and he wonders how the guy can make those throws he makes, whirl and sling, with power. He likes looking at the field under lights even if he has to worry about rain and even if it’s only afternoon and the full effect is not the same as in a night game when the field and the players seem completely separate from the night around them. He has been to one night game in his life, coming down from the bluff with his oldest brother and walking into a bowl of painted light. He thought there was an unknown energy flaring down out of the light towers, some intenser working of the earth, and it isolated the players and the grass and the chalk-rolled lines from anything he’d ever seen or imagined. They had the glow of first-time things.
I think “Underground” is probably his best book. Have fun with it!
Yeah – that’s what I’ve heard. I seem to recall my dad reading it and very much liking it.
If the first chapter is any indication, it’s gonna be awesome.
OH, this is a wonderful book. I’ve been lingering through it for years; it’s like a meal. One of these days I’ll finish it – my nice hardback is too big to carry around, same problem with Mason & Dixon among other moderns – but I find, oddly enough, no real pressure to do so. It’s enough to amble through it, tasting.
You’re going to love the baseball stuff, of course.
White Noise was good, Libra was good; the one that blew me away was Mao II. Underworld is pure pleasure. I know that sounds odd since I haven’t finished it, but, well, I’ve been reading it for years and loving every page, and I’m a loony, what can I say. There are books that drive to an ending, and books that invite the reader to swim in and explore…
Linus –
What an insightful great comment. My feeling (after reading only 6 pages of it) is that it is so rich, so deep, that it’s almost too much to really GET. You just have to let it wash over you.
Like Hoover in the stands at the Giants game … and suddenly a special agent comes up and whispers something in his ear … the Russians blew up an atomic device within their own borders … and Hoover’s reflections on it, the writing of what it might mean … in the middle of a baseball game –
It just gives such a rich look at a specific time and place.
Very excited. I have NO idea where the book is going to go.
Embarrassed to say I’ve never read DeLillo. But now, after reading those excerpts and comments, I feel compelled to do so. You’re right, Red. (I feel so funny calling you that, but calling you ‘Sheila’ here would be so counter-alliterative.) “The glow of first time things.” What a great line. Simple, evocative. Releasing all the pent-up beauty of that entire paragraph in one unerring observation.
Bernard …
All I can say is: it appears to keep getting better and better. This is some first-class writing. I’m VERY excited about it.
The Prologue of Underworld is so incredibly beautiful it almost hurts. I could read it once a week for a year and learn something new about writing every time. I felt the same way about Cunningham’s The Hours. So stinkin’ gorgeous it hurts.
Liz –
Dammit, you are SO RIGHT. The baseball game?? As a baseball fan – and as a Red Sox fan – that writing in the prologue was … perfect. Like – I’ve never actually been able to put all of that into words before, but I felt … wow. This guy gets it … he gets it on MY level, too. He sees baseball as a big American metaphor … he’s fanTAStic.
Actually, come to think of it – a lot of people think baseball is a metaphor for being American – but I have never ever heard it expressed so beautifully.
I was nodding my head as I read it.