The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  ONE: Underworld

  Once or twice a year you might happen across some radiant and quite unexpected verbal event, some divine turn in the common words, coming from an archangel such as Joan Didion or from some new guy who is tight with his own foreignness. But from Don DeLillo you can count on good sentences by the yard: he knows how to place an idea at the heart of every line, and he can command those sentences to live a life both pretty and profound. In England, you could count on one hand the number of living writers who possess a good combination of tenderness and gravity and who show an interest in imagining the relationship between individuals and the forces of the state, or in distilling the workings of the market, or the effects of the Cold War, the tragedy of nuclear waste, the absurd comedy of modern planning, or the way in which media images so madly intrude on the inner life. Where is the English novelist with the imaginative gumption to enter, subcutaneously, as DeLillo does, into the world of supermarkets, all-night gas stations, denatured submarine bases, hinterland housing projects, food-processing plants, the secret history of the soil beneath you, and the whole underworld of public and private affairs, all wired from the breathing perspective of the new family?

  Lionel Trilling once referred to the ‘habitual music of Scott Fitzgerald’s seriousness’. DeLillo has that too, and he has always been a student of American derangement. Very early in his career he demonstrated the ability to see madness inherent in contemporary ideas of communication and entertainment, and like nobody else, he has detected and followed the weird shadows passing over everyday life in the United States. In his first novel, Americana, it was the world of advertising. In that arena of excellent lies he saw how far a country might be steered from itself – very from its decent heart – if commercial energies went wild and free. In the world’s most populist country, DeLillo has always been the writer who understands the downside of mass democratic craving; he has written novels about the rock scene (Great Jones Street) and has upended the common apprehension of glory that feeds the great American sports (End Zone). Mass popularity, the rough hysteria of the common grain, has always fascinated DeLillo, and in most of his books he has led readers back, again and again, to the presence of threat in large groups of people who seem to believe in the same things. Like Elias Canetti or Sinclair Lewis, DeLillo has long drawn on the notion that crowds are often not good together, or that they are vulnerable to forces – some within, plenty without – that are not good for them. In his 1977 novel Players, he wrote about the terrorist as a figure who understands the way modern people move, and he examined the manner in which unnoticed lives can be subject to interventions they never suspected. Libra, his fictional account of the John F. Kennedy assassination, gave an unbelievably acute sense of how this kind of power had somehow moved from the centre of corporate agencies into the minds of individuals and into the living rooms of every one of us. By the time of Mao II, the terrorist had arrived at the place where he could replace the novelist: the man with the bomb, not the pen, was the one who could alter the consciousness of his times in an instant. But as if to contradict this, DeLillo’s vision has gathered force with each of his novels, and his finer sense of America’s talent for both massive secrecy and mass belief comes together in Underworld.

  Mao II opened with a crowd at Yankee Stadium, and the idea of crowds never left that book alone: ‘the future belongs to crowds’. Underworld opens in a stadium too, but the sinister sway of the crowd here quickly gives way to the slow movements of several individuals, and soon we are wrapped up in the matter of their interconnected yearnings and sufferings. The whole novel is a journey into the repositories of personal memory, on the one hand, and the grave machinations of global threat, on the other. Never before, on the page, have we been led to consider so deeply our spiritual reliance on the threat of nuclear destruction. Not in this way – with the smallness of lives so appended to the greatness – and not with such grand melody and sadness for the age we have lived through. DeLillo has come up with a Cold War lament, a sore song with which to close down the century, but all in all it is a work of magical rescue. His novel is like a flying carpet, beneath it Breughel’s The Triumph of Death. One art work standing inside another. And given this, we might come to feel, if only for the length of a long novel, that we now know the meaning of the term ‘mutually assured destruction’. The meaning of art and the meaning of weapons systems are seen to mingle and change places. DeLillo is interested in what art has to say about our vast dying.

  But it all starts with Bobby Thomson hitting his great home run – ‘the shot heard round the world’ – that gives the Giants the pennant. It is 1951, and J. Edgar Hoover shares a box at the New York Polo Grounds with Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and Toots Shor. The crowd is beneath them, begging for entertainment and its share in a day’s triumph. ‘All these people,’ DeLillo writes, ‘formed by language and climate and popular songs and breakfast foods … have never had anything in common so much as this, that they are sitting in the furrow of destruction.’ And the shrill promise of destruction is whispered into Hoover’s ear at the game: an aide comes with the news that the Russians have just tested their first atom bomb. The Director sees skeletons dancing about the field. You get the impression this is the news Hoover has waited for all his life. It means his time has been well spent, the Soviets are indeed a threat, and you can almost imagine him sleeping better at night for the realisation. ‘It’s not enough,’ he reckons, ‘to hate your enemy. you have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.’

  Underworld is vastly episodic: locations change from part to part, and so does time, and point of view. But the alternations only add to our sense of how time plays out in the average mind, and they might offer a lesson in how memory lives its own life, coming and going, bringing new stuff in a new way every time. The central figure in the book is a fifty-seven-year-old called Nick Shay. He is from the Bronx, he once had an affair with the wife of his chemistry teacher, who is now an artist, and he goes off to see some sort of installation she has created in the desert. ‘The past brings out our patriotism, you know?’ she tells him. ‘We want to feel an allegiance. It’s the one undivided allegiance, to all those people and things.’ Her name is Klara Sax. She is working in an area where America once tested its big bombs. She is famous. Nick and Klara, we might imagine, are the love interest, two more-or-less messed-up figures who once tried for love in a Cold War climate. Their love was deceitful and curious and a long time ago, yet it is a small moment of frozen urgency in both their lives. You get the feeling they know how their secret love happened to counterpoint a secret rage in the world around them. (They’re intelligent that way.) But they might also represent something else. He works in Waste; she works in Art. They are both concerned about the machinations of Defense. DeLillo gives you the feeling that the intimacy shared by these people is not only gone from them, it has become impossible.

  The work she is doing in the desert entails painting old B-52 bombers, and she is given to describing what she does in the following way:

  She said, ‘See, we’re painting, hand-painting in some cases, putting our puny hands to great weapons systems, to systems that came out of the factories and assembly halls as near alike as possible, millions of components stamped out, repeated endlessly, and we’re trying to unrepeat, to find an element of felt life, and maybe there’s a sort of survival instinct here, a graffiti instinct – to trespass and declare ourselves, show who we are.’

  Klara is an amalgam of New York 60s conceptualist art types, the sort of artist who is into found objects and who makes statements about waste and recycling. Her art and her speech and her memory are very much of a time: they rely on overexcited juxtaposition. Some of this excitement is clearly DeLillo’s own. She went to Truman Capote’s Black & White Ball and knew she might have stood next to J. Edgar Hoover, and later we hear, from Hoover’s point of view, that the anti-war protesters were gathered in force outside the Plaza. DeLillo, like all t
he most likable conspiracy theorists, is never one to miss a twist.

  The Thomson home run is viewed as a moment of innocence, and all around it that day had gathered the portents of doom. And the baseball itself (or a notion of the actual ball) is what beats us back ceaselessly into the past of this novel. The ball disappears, and the boy who caught it and the father he gave it to become characters in this account of contemporary American time. In those days before instant replays, the strike and the home run could only be seen to happen once, and then the event became part of the memory of the crowd. It could only be reproduced in the clear imagination. This is what I mean by innocence: the Thomson homer just happened once. In the future, nothing big that happened in public would ever happen just once.

  DeLillo’s Cold War childhood – the Bronx of those days, the immigrant scene – might be thought to lie buried at the palpitating heart of Underworld. The image of the baseball might bring him all the way to the center of his childhood fevers. For Nick Shay, as for millions of American boys and girls, the unfolding détente imposed order on his early life, and the rules of survival, the threat of ruin, offered a structure for living in those years of ‘duck and cover’ under the school desk.

  Nick’s colleague Brian has a conversation in the book with a guy called Marvin, who is a dedicated collector of baseball memorabilia. He is more than just a collector, though; he speaks like a trailer-park wizard. He is a seeker of meaning in the people’s century, and baseball, the everything of baseball, gives him his big way in.

  Brian said, ‘I went to a car show and it did something to me.’

  ‘What did it do?’

  ‘Cars from the nineteen-fifties. I don’t know.’

  ‘You feel sorry for yourself. You think you’re missing something and you don’t know what it is. You’re lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a full executed will, already, at your age, because the whole idea is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash. You used to have the same dimensions as the observable universe. Now you’re a lost speck. You look at old cars and you recall a purpose, a destination.’

  ‘It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? But probably harmless too.’

  ‘Nothing is harmless,’ Marvin said. ‘You’re worried and scared. You see the cold war winding down. This makes it hard for you to breathe.’

  Brian pushed through a turnstile from an old ballpark. It creaked sort of lovingly.

  Without the dependable threat of the Bomb, Brian, and Nick too, is simply and individually ‘the lost man of history’. Nick and Brian have a fin de siècle vibe about them. Each of them is packed with all the last-minute notions of the society to which they belong. They are waste experts. We have a fine sense of Shay’s emotional sickness: he is full of dread and bad information. He knows that one of the most disastrous ironies of our age is that we may in the end use nuclear weapons for one purpose only – to help in the killing of nuclear waste.

  Nick Shay is a man in pursuit of himself, a man who is no accidental American but someone charged with the ominous energies of the age, one who can feel history seeping through the walls of his every room. Despite all this appropriate darkness, Underworld contains some of the funniest of DeLillo’s writing. Meet Jesse Detwiler, ‘a fringe figure in the sixties, a garbage guerrilla who stole and analyzed the household trash of a number of famous people. He issued mock-comintern manifestos about the contents, with personal asides, and the underground press was quick to print this stuff. His activities had a crisp climax when he was arrested for snatching the garbage of J. Edgar Hoover from the rear of the director’s house in North Washington.’ In a manner we might recognise, Detwiler became sort of famous himself, ‘part of a strolling band of tambourine girls and bomb makers, levitators and acid droppers and lost children’.

  DeLillo grasps at the counterculture as a tale of America told by an idiot, full not only of sound and fury but also of a special kind of sense, and the kind of sense that would not go down well in a police state. They are a carnivalesque troupe who seek the higher truths, a generation who feel failed by their parents’ cars and houses and TVs, and who set out to open up their minds and to run from brutality. The spirit of wrecked shamanism is everywhere evident in Underworld – Lenny Bruce appears now and then – and the common, mainstream love of baseball is contrasted with that 60s generation, who sought a new commonality, and who often looked for it in painting and rock music and films.

  At one point in the book Klara Sax goes to see a new Eisenstein movie called Unterwelt. Long suppressed by the Soviets and the Germans, it is a portrait of strangely gray mutant figures scurrying around in some nether region, living in secret, fighting some powerful unknown quantity. From here DeLillo’s narrative itself goes underground, and we find a world there of apocalyptic graffiti artists, young Americans on the verge of something big, fame or destruction. ‘You can’t tell the difference between a soup can and a car bomb,’ thinks Nick’s brother Matt, adrift in his own weirdness, ‘because they are made by the same people in the same way and ultimately refer to the same thing.’

  The book is a furious and gentle montage in itself, an exercise in the uncovering of power-fantasy. The author has long been a good traveller over the landscape of America’s huge secrets. This time he went farther, went deeper: Underworld is a novel with a uniquely warm glow at its centre – the colour of a life’s experience, the noble gleam of decent inquiry properly met. DeLillo unwinds some of the more dark and mysterious configurations at the heart of American life during the Cold War. He takes us toward an understanding of how popular culture, across the century, has played into our dreams and our yearnings and our deepest fears, and he makes newly explicit the ties that bind art and ruin.

  TWO: Falling Man

  Let us take an ordinary man from that terrible day. His name is Kevin Michael Cosgrove. If you put his name into Google it takes exactly 0.12 seconds to discover he was born on January 6, 1955. It takes no longer than it is taking you to read this sentence to discover Mr Cosgrove lived in West Islip, New York, and worked as Claims Vice President of the Aon Corporation, based on the 105th floor of the South Tower. From the Wikipedia encyclopedia, you will find that he is buried in St Patrick’s Cemetery in Huntington. If you have another 10 seconds to spare, you will be able to click to an image of the South Tower moments before its collapse, and hear a recording of Mr Cosgrove speaking his last words to an operator. ‘I got young kids,’ he says. ‘We’re not ready to die.’ ‘Please hurry.’ ‘We’re young men.’ And at the building’s collapse, he says ‘Oh God.’

  Dying in full public view has been a theme of Don DeLillo’s since 9/11 was a nothing day in the average American calendar, a zone of post-vacation humdrum two days before the beginning of Ramadan and one week after Grandparents’ Day. In Libra, we find the image of a king mown down in his Lincoln in broad daylight, his death fixed in the gaze of his courtiers and his subjects. It was a scene to play forever in the public mind, and the exact moment of impact, as filmed on an 8 mm home movie camera by Abraham Zapruder, is understood in that book to act like an eye from the future, a place where the very worst of our dreams could be downloaded in 0.12 seconds. In a relatively recent Introduction to Libra, DeLillo outlines something he calls ‘Assassination Aura’, giving a notion of how the events of history might come to find themselves in the weave of fiction. ‘Some stories never end,’ he writes. ‘Even in our time, in the sightlines of living history, in the retrieved instancy of film and videotape, there are stories waiting to be finished, open to the thrust of reasoned analysis and haunted speculation. These stories, some of them, also undergo a kind of condensation, seeping into the texture of everyday life, barely separable from the ten thousand little excitations that define a routine day of visual and aural static processed by the case-hardened consumer brain.’

  It is the conjunction of visual technology and terrorism that really sets DeLillo’s mentality apart – a setting apar
t which also put him on the road to having 9/11 as his subject long before it happened. Players features Pammy and Lyle, a Wall Street couple who get tangled up with a bunch of terrorists. (When DeLillo was writing that novel, a nine-year-old boy called Mohamed Atta was studying English in the bedroom of his parents’ house in Giza outside Cairo.) That novel begins with a group of people on a plane watching an in-flight movie about a terrorist operation. It then moves to a scene inside the World Trade Center in which two women stand by the elevators and discuss their fear of being ‘torn asunder’. Pammy works in the North Tower for a company called Grief Management (‘Where else would you stack all this grief?’). She feels that ‘the towers didn’t seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light.’ And later on, when a group of friends are having a drink on the roof of their building and looking across at the WTC, someone remarks, ‘That plane looks like it’s going to hit.’

  Many of DeLillo’s novels are propelled by an acute sense of communal dread – of crowds, of surveillance, of the desperate ‘creativity’ of the terrorist, of an ‘airborne toxic event’ – and long before living history affirmed a number of his paranoid presumptions, his novels were making the case for America as a place where nothing very much was reliably innocent or safe. Here’s Jack Gladney in White Noise, head of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill:

  The discussion moved to plots in general. I found myself saying to the assembled heads, ‘All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.’