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<\/i> by Don DeLillo. I’ve read some of his earlier stuff – White Noise<\/i>, etc. But this book seems to far surpass his others, in terms of its scope.<\/p>\nThe 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
For example, this is the third paragraph of the book:<\/p>\n
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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And here is his description of a night-game:<\/p>\n
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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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