Underworld by Don DeLillo

So the latest book club book was Don DeLillo's Underworld. Jacob already has this covered, but I felt guilty not holding up my end of the book club. (Especially since I was the one who proposed this round's short list.) And this one is significant because he's our first repeat author, after we did White Noise a couple of years ago. Neither of us liked it much, but I'd tackled Americana by myself and enjoyed it considerably more. So Underworld, the canonical one, was the true test.

And the verdict is: meh. I think I'm getting burned out on ultra-post-whatever-modern writers. A girl needs a plot that hangs together once in a while, y'know? I don't want an epic that shows me everything you can do. I don't want clever conversation; I never want to work that hard; I want you just the waaaaay you are....Oops.

So yeah. I do like challenging books. But I'm willing to expend less and less patience on books that shuffle you around, tell you everything's brilliant, you'll see, it's coming, and then...fin. And DeLillo is really good at that--possibly the best. His writing is solid enough to keep you hooked in on the promise of a revelation that never actually comes. I get that this puts the focus on the characters and the mini-arcs he creates. But unless those come together in a cohesive way, it's more of an ambitious collection of short fiction than a single novel. And Underworld has too many moving pieces (few of which are linked in anything more than a perfunctory way) to be a satisfying whole.

The novel ostensibly follows Nick Shay, an Arizona waste management executive struggling in middle age with an unsatisfying marriage and a juvenile delinquent past he doesn't really want to think about. But DeLillo does, and so 80% of the book is spent trying to tie Nick's past with the American 20th century landscape. This includes baseball (of course), the atomic bomb, the New York art scene, and Cold War anxieties. As separate pieces of fiction, they work. I especially liked the middle section, following an artist, Klara Sax, who struggles with her identities as a wife/mother and an artist in the 50s. But DeLillo needs to connect it to the whole, so he has her seduce a young Nick, cougar-style, so that she's joined with the rest of the book. It seems like a waste of a strong female character, to have her only real use to the main narrative be a single sexual encounter.

And I really did enjoy the book's opening set piece, the 1951 Dodgers-Yankees pennant game, featuring an unexpected cast: a young Harlem kid who'd snuck into the game and manages to come away with the mythic homerun ball; Frank Sinatra; Jackie Gleason; and J. Edgar Hoover. It's interesting and extremely well-written. I just wish the rest of it could have been more cohesive in its grandness.