James Wood
Underworld seems to me an achieved failure, of a kind any novelist might have been proud to produce. It is so often well- written, so punctually intelligent, so serious and ambitious, that it almost produces its own antibodies and makes criticism a small germ. One faults this novel warily, because DeLillo is an important novelist, apparently committed to restocking the novel’s wasting pedigree in our age.
But Underworld certainly fails. First, it shows us that it is almost impossible to write a long, old-fashioned book packed with characters if the novelist does not believe in character. Until now, the absence of real human beings in DeLillo’s fiction has been an unimportant, even welcome absence.
But this novel’s post-modern Victorian intention is to penetrate many layers of American society from the early 1950s to the early 1990s. Yet the novel struggles to gather its many local brilliancies into something prolongedly engaging and moving, precisely because we care so little about its characters.
With the exception of Nick Shay, the novel’s protagonist, we don’t spend enough time with the many characters for their lives to seem more than a rattle of months on the page. It would seem to be DeLillo’s desire to make the book a collection of lavish fragments, to suggest a maze of alienation and disconnection. But a novel about how uninvolved Americans are with each other still has to involve the reader in its portrait of uninvolvement.
DeLillo does not really manage this paradox. His book is deeply readable, but it accumulates rather than swells. One feels at the end that it might easily have been twice as long, or half as long, and carried exactly the same weight.
Underworld has no pivot. Its big, broken structure moves back and forward through all the decades since 1951. For 50 pages we are with Nick Shay in Phoenix in 1992; for another 50 pages in the Bronx with a group of charitable nuns in the 1980s; then we move back to 1974, where we spend time with Klara Sax, a conceptual artist, in New York; then back to Harlem, in 1951. Near the end, for 120 pages, we visit Nick’s childhood, in the Italian Bronx of the 1950s, a great extended passage, and the novel’s deepest piece of writing.
Of all these people, only Nick exists, and he exists greyly. It would be hard to describe Nick once the novel has ended. Fictionally speaking, he is a stranger promoted above his station.
A deeper reason for the novel’s failure is that it seems untrue — not unrealistic, but actually false. It seems politically and intellectually false. The novel investigates the shadow cast over American lives by the invention of the nuclear bomb. Most of the novel’s characters are marked by the dreadful knowledge of atomic power, and many have apparently been made paranoid by this knowledge.
Nick’s brother, Matt, works on nuclear armaments, and believes that “Everything connects in the end.” As a soldier in Vietnam, he wondered: “How you can tell the difference between orange juice and Agent Orange if the same massive system connects them at levels outside your comprehension?”
Almost all of the novel’s characters are paranoids of one kind or another. There is a difference between J Edgar Hoover’s paranoia and the hapless paranoia of the ordinary American. DeLillo certainly believes this. But the effect of the novel is to blend these different paranoias into one larger paranoia.
Although DeLillo appears to want to fight the evil paranoia of Hoover, and the evil of a “massive system” that connects Agent Orange and orange juice, his novel ends up flattering the paranoid vision of Hoover, because it so immaculately fulfils Hoover’s deepest wishes.
This is a novel in which everything connects. Its characters are not simply Hoover’s children, but Hoover’s envoys, even as they resist him. Indeed, Underworld itself is one of Hoover’s children.
The difficulty is one of intellectual coherence, or discrimination. Early in the book, J Edgar Hoover, America’s greatest paranoid, makes an appearance as a character. Hearing that the Russians have detonated an atomic device in Kazakhstan, he realises, with apparent relish, the opportunities for secrecy and paranoia that this invention opens up: “The occasion it creates for new secrets. For every atmospheric blast . . . a hundred plots go underground, to spawn and skein.” This is the novel’s project: to tell the secret history, the plots of a generation forced underground by the bomb.
DeLillo says, in effect, the bomb was administered by paranoids (Hoover and his like), and it turned Americans into paranoiacs. And DeLillo shows us what these paranoiacs look like. But this is where the intellectual imprecision of the novel resides. There is a difference between Hoover’s paranoia and the hapless paranoia of the ordinary American. DeLillo certainly believes this. But the effect of the novel is to blend these different paranoias into one larger paranoia — the fear that “everything connects in the end”.
Although DeLillo appears to want to fight the evil paranoia of Hoover, and the evil of a “massive system” that connects Agent Orange and orange juice, his novel ends up flattering the paranoid vision of Hoover, because it so immaculately fulfils Hoover’s deepest wishes. It is one thing for Matt Shay to believe that there is no difference between Agent Orange and orange juice; but it is another thing for the very novel to seem to endorse this view. And DeLillo does seem to endorse it. This is a novel in which everything connects. Its characters are not simply Hoover’s children, but Hoover’s envoys, even as they resist him. Indeed, Underworld itself is one of Hoover’s children.
So Underworld surrenders fiction to the mysticism it should repel. The paranoia that believes that “everything is connected” is a mysticism at odds with the secularism of fiction’s actual task. After all, paranoia believes that connections are endless; fiction’s task is to show where connections seem to end, the better to examine their vivid spread. But in this novel it is difficult to discriminate between different characters and their different allegiances. Hoover is as “interesting”, and as wrong or as right, as Matt Shay. One does not care; but one should care, and should be made to care, and this seems not only an aesthetic failure on DeLillo’s part, but a political failure.
A careless and incoherent leftism, whereby America is seen as irredeemably damaged by the bomb, likewise damages this novel. This is strange. The feeble leftism that DeLillo so smartly burlesqued in White Noise he now appears to revere. It is noticeable that, almost without fail, whenever DeLillo writes about conspiracies and secrets and American paranoias, his language, usually exact, becomes a thick scrabble, becomes sentimental and windy. There is a pompousness in this novel that suggests not so much epic ambition as epic confusion.