Don DeLillo’s Underworld is the vast, churning, raw glory of New York turned into words. When he wrote the novel, in the 1990s, it captured the arc of the American story that the post-war generation had experienced and brought it to life in his own city. The story opens with a scene that will stir any true New Yorker – at a famous baseball game between the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951 where we find, sitting together, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover and the comedian Jackie Gleeson. Could anything be a better introduction to the 1950s (even if Gleeson does end up being sick on Sinatra’s shoes)?
With this month’s group of Bookclub readers, DeLillo looked back to his own youth in the Bronx , remembering the poetry of the streets. ‘I think somewhere in the book there must be a description of a summer night in a particular street – the way streets were crowded with people, sitting on the stoops outside, reading newspapers, drinking a beer, with the women, many of them, up on the top floors trying to wash the dinner dishes but they can’t ‘cos the fire hydrant is on and kids are running under the hydrant to get the spray so there was no water upstairs and they shouted down…it was tropical in a curious way…’
This is an atmospheric novel that takes you to these streets, with the narrator Nick Shay as guide. He was a troubled kid – locked up for misbehaviour – who ends up in the business of waste management. He’s the man who helps New York get rid of its rubbish. And in a way, that’s the whole story – a clearing away of memories, disasters and successes, the past and its people.
Reflecting on his city, De Lillo sees Underworld as marking the end of one American era : the time that turned on the sixties – a decade of war, assassinations and the loss of innocence – when the baby boomers grew up in the knowledge of the Cold War, and the feeling that the world could come to an end.
But Underworld is also an affectionate remembrance, a piece of relaxed story telling that weaves the characters in the streets together with the preoccupations of their time and paints a picture that is vivid and vast. The atmosphere of the city around him, De Lillo says, was ‘densely affecting’ and that’s the spirit of the book.
He also talked about how the place has changed. His novel Cosmopolis (2003) pictures the world of the super-rich of Wall Street and since the crash of 2008 DeLillo has often been called prophetic (which he finds inaccurate and perhaps even a little embarrassing). But his feelings about the gap between the rich and the rest still run strong. He imagined in Cosmopolis a man buying an apartment for $100 million. He noticed recently that it had happened.
‘It does make me feel that we are losing control.'
Underworld is an ambitious novel that can easily become a companion, like a friend with whom you enjoy long reminiscences. For many people it has become one of the great contemporary American novels. I hope you enjoy hearing Don DeLillo on Bookclub on Sunday.
Our next choice is the prize-winning ‘H is for Hawk’ by Helen Macdonald, and you can hear that on the first Sunday of October.
Happy reading,
Jim.