The Books: “Underworld” (Don Delillo)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Underworld.jpgUnderworld – by Don DeLillo

I have very conflicting feelings about this massive tome. Here’s an open letter to Don DeLillo – I wasn’t even finished with the book yet when I wrote that … and my feelings about the book remain the same, even after finishing it. Weird. The opening – a 52 page masterpiece – takes place at this famous event. First of all: I love baseball writing – and the opening of Underworld is some of the best baseball writing I have ever read. Like: EVER. That opening blew me AWAY. The writing! My God. Even though, for me, the whole book doesn’t add up (and it’s 5,000 pages long – it took me FOREVER to finish it) – that opening is worth the price of admission. I’m sure lots of people would say, ‘Well, it’s part of a hugely flawed whole – so no, I won’t give that opening the props.” And I can see their point. I was SO disappointed that the rest of the book did not fulfill the promise of that opening. On page 958, when they reintroduced a character I hadn’t seen for 500 pages – and I had no idea who he was, or why I should care … I was like: BRO. WHAT are you doing??? WHO is Mr. Bronzini? And why he is he back in this book with his arthritic fingers? WHAT ABOUT THE GIANTS-DODGERS GAME IN 1951?? And Bobby Thomson’s walkoff homerun? Can we go back THERE? Now: all of this being said:

As with any DeLillo book – you’re gonna get brilliant writing. And there is brilliant prose throughout. If you’ve read a DeLillo book (uhm – Linus?? hahaha) then you know what I am talking about.

For me, with Underworld, it wasn’t enough. And it made me sad – because the “prologue” was so off-the-charts amazing. I mean, everyone knows what happened at that game (at least baseball fans do) – but it’s how DeLillo writes about it – how he metaphorizes it (word?) – how he pulls his lens BACK to get perspective and then pushes his lens further IN to see the miniscule … I mean, I would honestly say: If you’re interested in great writing, you could get away with just reading the prologue of Underworld.

The book – although huge – dissolved into thin air after I read it – and I couldn’t tell you much about it. A strange experience. It didn’t STICK.

Linus left a great comment on my White Noise excerpt below which describes the sensation perfectly:

I do so love Don DeLillo, even when he isn’t brilliant – because when he is, nobody does it better. The only downside for me is that I sometimes find it very hard to remember his books. The writing gets so transparent that sometimes it blurs and vanishes once I’m past it.

Odd. But that is my experience as well.

However: if all one did in one’s life was write something as good as that prologue in Underworld, then one could die happy.

I’m not going to excerpt that, though – because it would ruin it. To take it apart, or take a piece out.

There’s another event early in the book … the surrounding details are gone for me – but I know this: A narrator goes out into the desert to look at an art project. There are all these old rusting military planes – out in the middle of the desert in, New Mexico, I think … relics of the cold war (that’s a huge theme of the book: the cold war is over … now what?) … and a group of artists and mechanics and renovators and pilots have gathered for a big project to “save” the planes – to not let them rust away into nothing. It’s basically being turned into a giant art installation in the middle of nowhere. The “campsite” for the Project itself is a couple miles away – and you have to drive through nothingness to get to the planes.

This is a description of the narrator (who is he?? There are multiple narrators in this book and I can’t remember any of them) … driving out to see the planes.

It gives a taste of the greatness (potential) of this book.

The writing. Holy GOD. There’s a moment where he describes seeing something “so moving” that you know you’re supposed to move on immediately – to let it be a flash – to not try to hold onto it … move on, move on … It’s just so perfectly described.

It just doesn’t add up – the book itself – and that’s a huge bummer for me.

But I encourage anyone who loves baseball – or who just loves good writing – to read the prologue of Underworld. You won’t be sorry!!


EXCERPT FROM Underworld – by Don DeLillo

I drove out to the site at sunrise. I parked near an equipment shed and began to climb a small rise that would place me at a natural vantage in relation to the aircraft. I heard them before I saw them, an uneasy creaking, wind gusts spinning the movable parts. Then I reached the tip of the sandstone ledge and there they were in broad formation across the bleached bottom of the world.

I didn’t know there would be so many planes. I was astonished at the number of planes. They were arranged in eight staggered ranks with a few stray planes askew at the fringes. I counted every last plane as the sun came up. There were two hundred and thirty planes, swept-winged, finned like bottom creatures, some painted in part, some nearly completed, many not yet touched by the paint machines, and these last were gunship gray or wearing faded camouflage or sanded down to bare metal.

The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light – the whole thing odly personal, a sense of one painter’s hand moved by impulse and afterthought as much as by epic design. I hadn’t expected to register such pleasure and sensation. The air was color-scrubbed, coppers and ochers burning off the metal skin of the aircraft to exchange with the framing desert. But these colors did not simply draw down power from the sky or lift it from the landforms around us. They pushed and pulled. They were in conflict with each other, to be read emotionally, skin pigments and industrial grays and a rampant red appearing repeatedly through the piece – the red of something released, a burst sac, all blood-pus thickness and runny underyellow. And the other planes, decolored, still wearing spooky fabric over the windscreen panels and engines, dead-souled, waiting to be primed.

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

She wanted us to see a single mass, not a collection of objects. She wanted our interest to be evenly spaced. She insisted that our eyes go slowly over the piece. She invited us to see the land dimension, horizonwide, in which the work was set.

I listened to the turboblades rattle in the wind and felt the sirocco heat come blowing in and my eyes did in fact go slowly over the ranks and I felt a kind of wildness all around me, the grim vigor of weather and desert, and those old weapons so forcefully rethought, the fittingness of what she’d done, but when I’d seen it all I knew I wouldn’t stay an extra second.

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5 Responses to The Books: “Underworld” (Don Delillo)

  1. Jeff says:

    The baseball prologue is one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing. I have to confess that I’ve never been able to make it through the rest of the book. I’ve always made the mistake of beginning it when too much is going on in my life, and if there’s any book that demands absolute focus, it’s this one. Hopefully someday.

  2. Kathy says:

    The writing is gorgeous. That baseball prologue is fantastic, and there’s no getting around its brilliance, but I got so frustrated with the rest of this book that I actually *threw* it across the room when I reached page 708. For some strange reason, I was massively disappointed when it didn’t leave a gouge the plaster. (No books were harmed during the making of the non-existent gouge. Which shouldn’t have been surprising, given Underworld’s heft.)

    It just got to the point where I realized the only character I cared about was the baseball. If you could ever call a baseball a character.

  3. red says:

    Kathy – “when I reached page 708” – hahahahahaha I KNOW! I was PISSED at the end of the book, too, I really was. I just felt let down by it – and also it just took me forever to finish it, and I was like, by the end: Uhm … that’s it??

    But that beginning section – man oh man.

    That game and how he talks about it.

    !!!!

  4. Linus says:

    I loved the desert sculpture event even more than I loved the baseball game.

    I never read past that part – I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about this before, haven’t we? – and at the end of the day I’m OK with it as a feature, not a bug. I read the part I liked, and I really liked it, and the book didn’t seem to be heading anywhere so I stopped reading, and I liked that too. I haven’t finished Gravity’s Rainbow either, and I’ve been reading that for decades.

    Who knows, maybe someday I’ll like the rest of it too.

    DeLillo did a rough of the ball game section in Harper’s quite some time ago. I don’t know if he was writing Underworld yet or if he was just getting some focus on the event. When I went to a reading he gave at Amerika Haus in Berlin (and that was just weird all around) he talked about his growing interest in crowds as opposed to individuals: social and mass movements that sweeping people and events into a grand tide. He talked about how writers like Cheever spent a lifetime trying to understand the momentary mind of an adulterous woman standing at the window of a hotel where she has just had sex with her lover, whereas his own interest was with the guy in the bleachers surging to his feet with the rest of everyone as the ball leaves the park and history is made – puzzling out how we enter history, and how history swirls around us.

    The central event of Mao II, which was current at the time, also takes place in a stadium, and it’s thrilling how he moves from the mass to the moment.

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