'Against the force of history, so powerful, visible and real, the novelist poses the idiosyncratic self. Here it is, sly, mazed, mercurial, scared half-crazy. It is also free and undivided, the only thing that can match the enormous dimensions of social reality.' - Don DeLillo, "The Power of History"
What is it about Don DeLillo? It could be the humor - wry, assholish, familiar, biting, as in the line in 'The Angel Esmeralda' about the junkies who wear dead men's Reeboks, an observation so precise that it's difficult to stifle a laugh, and if someone asks you what made you laugh, it's even more difficult to admit that Don DeLillo's evocation of the pathetic refugees of the bombed-out Bronx tickled you so. It could be the method by which he alchemizes street speech, formal grammar, the anti-language of bureaucratize and the shorthand patois of marketing, advertising, military banter into that very peculiar dialect of English - American. It could be his obsessions - cities, paranoia as a state of mind and a reaction to the conspiracies that do exist, the circling dance that Art, Capital, Sex, Death perform that, when viewed, passes for culture. Who knows? DeLillo himself doesn't seem to. He has said in interviews that he views his sentences as sculptures periodically, and will rearrange the meaning of the sentence based on the aesthetics of the rise and fall of the letters as the reader progresses. His view of human nature alternates between dim and completely irrelevant. He is the most modern of my favorite living writers, has been hailed as a prophetic novelist who foretold the Age of Terror by critics, yet he rarely participates in the modern world.
When I am feeling particularly good about myself, I like to think that he reminds me of me.
Recently The New Yorker published a review of The Angel Esmeralda, DeLillo's recently released short story collection. Martin Amis, who expands learnedly about DeLillo's interest in Terror, that group Fear so distinct from personal Fear, but the best thought in the whole essay is the first, when Amis says that when we say we love a writer, we really mean that we love about half of that writer's work. Not necessarily half of what we've read, but half of the works. DeLillo hits about .500 with me. I haven't read Americana, End Zone, Ratner's Star, Point Omega. I could stand to have back the time I spent reading Players and Cosmopolis. The Body Artist has fantastic prose wed to plotless noodling while Falling Man puts one of DeLillo's unemotional blankmen through the World Trade Center attacks and though there is some irony in the juxtaposition of the flat, affectless narration and the horror that it details, I don't think irony was DeLillo's intention. Either way, I would file them under Interesting Failures - worth reading, if only to see what happens when certain enjoyable artistic sensibilities overwhelm the contexts that define them as strengths and become weaknesses indulged.
Which leaves us with White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld. Combine them with the Interesting Failures, and I love about half of DeLillo's writing. As individual works, my overwhelming preference is for Underworld. I'll get to a defense of that in a bit, but first I want to unpack why I think the best way to understand and appreciate them is as one colossal text.
White Noise is often held up as DeLillo's best work. I disagree, but I don't think it's germane in any case. Even those who dislike Underworld, and there are plenty of people who find it a turgid, pretentious slog, wouldn't argue that it's DeLillo's magnum opus, and that he intended it as such. White Noise separates into two neat parts: Before the Airbone Toxic Event and After the Airborne Toxic Event. Both parts cover most of the same thematic territory, but the first plays as high satire while the second shows the tragedy that arises because of the weaknesses that are the objects of such fun in the first. It's a smart method of organizing the novel, but I think the comedy plays much better. Here's why: Jack Gladney, the professor of Hitler Studies at an unnamed liberal arts college somewhere in America, is a milquetoast. He is married to Babette, and together they do nothing and raise their kids. Gladney is ensconced in a safe world of classrooms and lecture halls, studying the most dangerous politician in history. He spends hours roaming through the supermarket, where he admires the bounty of freedom and ponders which peanut butter he'll try today. He and Babette stay awake and talk about how their mutual fear of death is a wonderful bond. They are boring. Gladney may be the most useless human being on Earth, and DeLillo skewers him mercilessly. Gladney as an object of satire is ripe. He's inherently funny (one doesn't become the head of Hitler studies without a sense of humor) and he's the sort of person most of us like to see mocked. Once the plot kicks in to gear and Gladney ineptly deals with the fallout of the Airborne Toxic Event and the revelation that Babette is cheating on him, we are exposed to the tragic consequences of Gladney's consumerism, academic detachment and fear of death. Unfortunately, tragic consequences require a tragic hero and Jack Gladney is a shitty hero. White Noise is mainly about consumerism and the pernicious effect of media, but the meandering comic first half is much more effective than the dark, plotty second.
Consumerism: Theme 1.
Some dipshit once said that Libra was an act of bad citizenship. It is a novel that follows the efforts of a researcher with the Central Intelligence Agency who is writing a history of the Kennedy assassination. Every other chapter is devoted to a close-third person narrative that tracks the life of Lee Harvey Oswald as it moves him toward Dallas. The remaining chapters follow completely fictional right-wingers within the national intelligence operations who conceive and execute an assassination of John F. Kennedy with the aid of Oswald, Ruby, Ferrie, Shaw and other real-life characters. DeLillo did massive research for the book, but was inspired to write it because Oswald grew up near DeLillo in The Bronx. That is to say, he imagined the life of a boy not unlike himself, from a similar milieu, whose circumstances eventually diverged in all particulars save that shared upbringing. He used his imagination to concoct a plausible, though fictional, explanation for what happened on November 22, 1963. DeLillo used known facts to create a reality slightly apart from the one that most people inhabit. Which, of course, is what most fiction writers do: alter the details of daily existence to expose truths hidden within the quotidian. All novels are poor history and bad citizenship, given that their whole purpose is to transform our accepted perception of reality.
History: Theme 2.
My suspicion is that Mao II is only interesting within the cycle of novels that begins with White Noise and culminates with Underworld. The characters are thin, constructs that DeLillo uses to explore themes. Action within the novel is scant, and the most interesting event is an affair between two of the thin characters that has few repercussions. The main theme of Mao II is the diminished role of the artist in public life. DeLillo contrasts an aging novelist with a young radical and demonstrates the greater impact that the anonymous would-be terrorist has on the broad consciousness of society than the famed writer. Personally, I think that DeLillo overestimates and romanticizes the capacity of art to shake the world and his thesis that violent young men have displaced educated older men in the public mind falls apart when you examine any historical epoch. It was Odysseus and the Aegeans who razed Troy, after all. Not Homer.
Art: Theme 3.
Underworld brings together the three themes that DeLillo explored separately in White Noise, Libra and Mao II. Its opening sequence, which recounts the experiences of a few people in attendance at the single-game playoff between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers to determine the National League pennant in 1951, is the first and best of Underworld's many great setpieces. Theme 1, consumerism, is everywhere. People pay to attend the game. They purchase hot dogs and peanuts. Advertisements for cigarettes and magazines and grooming products abound. History provides both the backdrop and the foreground action. The game DeLillo portrays actually happened, historical figures like Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor and J. Edgar Hoover, all of whom he weaves into the narrative, were actually in attendance. Russ Hodges actually called the game. The Soviets did in fact detonate a hydrogen bomb for the first time on the same day. Check for Theme 2. The third theme, Art, is subtly integrated, but definitely present. Hodges is the most obvious example of an artist at work in the historical context. He comments on the action, projecting his own sensibility on the unfolding events, but also narrates the feel of the day and the sound of the crowd for the listeners at home. There is an obvious corollary to the story that DeLillo is constructing. Other than Hodges, and deeper in terms of Underworld’s internal logic, is the painting The Triumph of Death, from which the section takes its title. The Triumph of Death depicts a dark army of skeletons and corpses overrunning revelers and townsfolk in a burned-out landscape. After Bobby Thomson hits the so-called ‘Shot Heard ‘Round the World’ to win the game for the Giants, fans in the upper decks tear apart newspapers and magazines and send a celebratory rain of confetti down onto the box where Hoover sits next to a puke-covered Gleason, having just been informed of the Soviet bomb. Printed on one of the fluttering pages is The Triumph of Death. Hoover catches the page and contemplates the historical event in which he is participating against the historical event of which he has just been informed. He wonders which will win out. DeLillo spends the remainder of the book depicting artists grappling with the violence, despair and death of the forty years between the game and the present while the mass of the country distracts itself from these forces with goods and consumer culture. More than a few critical assessments of Underworld love the opening and closing sections and discount the meat of the book. While there is some validity to these complaints (the first and last sections are the best parts of the novel), skipping the middle means missing the fantastic, and entirely fictional, Lenny Bruce stand-up sets during the Cuban Missile Crisis, missing the evocation of New York during the summer garbage strike of 1974, missing the advertising executive who takes the last train to Westport, where he is accompanied by men who are bound by nothing, save ‘the evilness of their dreams.’ The themes recur as the population of the novel increases, but this never seems redundant. Rather, DeLillo is positing that we are all bound by the culture we share, and he explicates how that culture is created and destroyed, and how the destruction feeds the creation. Klara Sax, the main artist figure of the novel, collects mothballed B-52 bombers, the deliverers of destruction in the desert for a large art installation. DeLillo is unwinkingly serious about the feedback loop between death and art.
Put a bit more simply, Underworld is the strongest and best of Don DeLillo’s works, and therefore one of the strongest and best books of the last thirty years. To use one of the master metaphors of Underworld, Caro may have a better batting average than DeLillo, but DeLillo, when he connects, hits the ball a lot harder.
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