Home-Runs and Atom Bombs
Don Delillo's Underworld
Mark Berkey-Gerard
January 1, 1999
It's been well over a year since Don DeLillo's latest novel, Underworld, emerged to critical acclaim and found a place on the best-seller list. I lugged the 800-plus-page book around for much of that year—to the beach, on a cross country road trip, on countless subways. My wife kept asking jokingly if I had "finished that mob novel yet." Underworld (which has nothing to do with organized crime) became one of those lingering reads. Along the way I finished other books in days or weeks, but Underworld's characters haunted and followed me for months.
Underworld manages to follow the last 50 years of American history in the same way. DeLillo writes a self-proclaimed "secret history" of the unraveling of America—from the introduction of the atomic bomb, through the unrest of the '60s, to the fear and posturing of the cold war, ending in today's hyperlinked age. DeLillo exposes the forces that create postmodern culture, tracking the undercurrents that pull our collective and private lives together. For DeLillo, everything—politics, sports, religion, art, technology—connects through the deteriorating frame of our cultural infrastructure.
The story begins in 1951 at a baseball game between the Giants and the Dodgers, where Bobby Thompson hits his legendary home run—the "Shot Heard Round the World." In the stands, next to Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra, sits J. Edgar Hoover, who has just learned of the Soviets' test of the atomic bomb. In the hilariously dark scene, DeLillo constructs a watershed event on which to pin our country's undoing. In an instant, the jubilant fans rush the field, Gleason, who's had too much to drink, pukes in Hoover's shoe, and a bomb detonates. The power of juxtaposition comes of age, and the world will ...
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