by Martin Amis
The machine makes everything a message, which … destroys the poetry of nobody home. Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home or not home. They’re either picking up or not picking up.
Independent on Sunday September 1991
Underworld by Don DeLillo
Expect a lot from the next sentence. Among its other virtues, the title of Don DeLillo’s heavily brilliant new book gives a convenient answer to the Big Question about the American novel: where has the mainstream been hiding? The grand old men, the universal voices of the late-middle century (predominantly the great Jews, and John Updike), are getting older and grander, but the land they preside over looked to be shrinking. Furthermore, it seemed that their numbers were not being replenished by writers of comparable centrality. Was this an epochal change, a major extinction? No. It was a strategic lull.
Something atomized the mainstream. The next wave of genius was there, but not visibly, not publicly. Inasmuch as the mainstream was an institution, these writers could not work within it. They went underground, they sought an underworld of codes and shadows: incognito, incommunicado, and quietly dissident, their literary reputations largely cult-borne. But now the condition that caused the great discontinuity in American letters has come to an end. The novelists are climbing out of the bunker. Don DeLillo’s exact contemporaries, Robert Stone and Thomas Pynchon, seem poised for a fuller expansion. DeLillo himself, however, suddenly fills the sky. Underworld may or may not be a great novel, but there is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great novelist.
Needless to say, his was already a redoubtable body of work. Here is a writer of high intellect and harsh originality, equipped with extraordinary gifts of eye and ear – and of nose, palate and fingertip. Right from the start – Americana (1971) – DeLillo appeared tricked out and tooled up, his prose hard-edged, pre-stressed, sheet-metalled. As a young writer, naturally, he was only intermittently in full control of his energies. The next four novels, which include the little diamond of comic invention, End Zone, and the big, bountiful and necessary failure, Ratner’s Star, showed a similar erratic intensity; as narratives, they felt defiantly shapeless and almost humorously static. They didn’t head towards a destination; they went down culs-de-sac, performing frequent U-turns and handbrake skids; and they waited in jams. In particular, they didn’t ‘end’. They just stopped. DeLillo’s alienation was never facile or reflexive; it was rich, dark and dangerous. But he was still a turbulent tributary searching for a river.
Running Dog (1978) signalled the fresh surge. This lean, mean, inch-perfect political thriller was followed by a long and improbably mellifluous departure, The Names, DeLillo’s European – or Mediterranean – novel. Of course, DeLillo has always been a literary writer: deeply literary, and also covertly literary. In The Names the high style often feels stiff and inelastic; he can do it, but he looks musclebound. The experiment, in any event, was clearly salutary, because hereafter we hit the mother lode. First, that beautifully tender anxiety-dream, White Noise. And then Libra, the through-the-roof masterpiece. And then the cool formal artistry of Mao II. And then this.
The new novel is Don DeLillo’s wake for the cold war. According to its argument, the discontinuity in American cultural life had a primary cause: nuclear weapons. The hiatus was inaugurated on the day that Truman loosed the force from which the sun draws its powers against those who brought war to the Far East; and it was institutionalized four years later when the Soviet Union started to attain rough parity. Cosmic might was now being wielded by mortal hands, and by the State, which made the appropriate adjustments. The State was your enemy’s enemy; but nuclear logic decreed that the State was no longer your friend. In one of the novel’s childhood scenes, the schoolteacher (a nun) equips her class with dog-tags:
The tags were designed to help rescue workers identify children who were lost, missing, injured, maimed, mutilated, unconscious or dead in the hours following the onset of atomic war … Now that they had the tags, their names inscribed on wispy tin, the drill was not a remote exercise but was all about them, and so was atomic war.
Nuclear war never happened, but this was the nuclear experience, unknowable to anyone born too soon or too late. In order to know what it was, you have to have been a schoolchild, crouched under your desk, hoping it would protect you from the end of the world. How people arranged their lives around this moral void, with its exorbitant terror and absurdity, is DeLillo’s subject. Perhaps it always has been. The new novel, at any rate, is an 827-page damage-check.
Underworld surges with magisterial confidence through time (the last half-century) and through space (Harlem, Phoenix, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Texas, the Bronx), mingling fictional characters with various heroes of cultural history (Sinatra, Hoover, Lenny Bruce). But its true loci are ‘the white spaces on the map’, the test sites, and its main actors are psychological ‘downwinders’, victims of the fallout from the blasts – blasts actual and imagined. DeLillo, the poet of paranoia and the ‘world hum’, pursues his theme unstridently; he is tenacious without being tendentious. Yet even his portraits of bland, hopeful, pre-post-modern American life – his Americana – glow with the sick light of betrayal, of innocence traduced or abused. The ‘great thrown shadow’ has now receded and terror has returned to the merely local. MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) was exploded; and the bombs did not detonate. Still, the press-ganged children who wore the dog-tags must live with a discontinuity in their minds and hearts. DeLillo’s prologue is called ‘The Triumph of Death’, after the Breughel painting. In the end, death didn’t triumph. It just ruled, for fifty years. I understand DeLillo to be saying that all our better feelings took a beating during those decades. An ambient mortal fear constrained us. Love, even parental love, got harder to do.
The protagonist, Nick Shay, works for a company called Waste Containment. And Underworld is among other things a witty and dramatic meditation on excreta, voidance, leavings, garbage, junk, slag, dreck. A drunken spectator at the 1951 Dodgers–Giants playoff leans forward and disgorges a length of ‘flannel matter. He seems to be vomiting someone’s taupe pajamas.’ A newlywed on his honeymoon finds that ‘his BMs’ (daily ‘hygiene’ is another euphemism) ‘are turning against him’: ‘that night Marvin had to make an emergency visit to the hotel toilet, where he unleashed a fire wall of chemical waste’. This is human waste, forgivable waste. But then there is nuclear waste: the stuff that never goes away and makes heaven stop its nose. In the exceptionally inspired epilogue, entitled ‘Das Kapital’, Shay visits the Museum of Misshapens in Semipalatinsk and confronts foetuses preserved in Heinz pickle-jars. Then he visits the radiation clinic and sees, among others, a ‘woman with features intact but only half a face somehow, everything fitted into a tilted arc that floats above her shoulders like the crescent moon’.
In White Noise the famous ‘airborne toxic event’ was the result of a military-industrial accident. But it was also DeLillo’s metaphor for television – for the virulent ubiquity of the media spore. Explaining a recent inanity committed by his daughter, Shay’s co-worker ‘made a TV screen with his hands, thumbs horizontal, index fingers upright, and he looked out at me from inside the frame, eyes crossed, tongue lolling in his head’. DeLillo’s way with dialogue is not only inimitably comic; it also mounts an attack on the distortions, the jumbled sound bites, of our square-eyed age. ‘I’ll quote you that you said that.’ ‘She’s got a great body for how many kids?’ ‘They put son of a bitches like you behind bars is where you belong.’ ‘I’m a person if you ask me questions. You want to know who I am? I’m a person if you’re too inquisitive I tune you out completely.’ ‘Which is the whole juxt of my argument.’
It should be said in conclusion that those who stay with this book will experience an entirely unexpected reward. Underworld is sprawling rather than monumental, and it is diffuse in a way that a long novel needn’t necessarily be. There is an interval, approaching halfway, when the performance goes awful quiet. But then it rebuilds, rega
thering all its mass. As I noticed the surprising number of approximations DeLillo settles for (‘a kind of sadness’, ‘sort of semidebonaire’, ‘a certain funky something’), my feelings about the author began to change. Reading his corpus, sensing the rigour of his language, the near-inhuman discipline of his perceptions and the severity of his gaze, you often feared for the man’s equilibrium. Yet who was the man? DeLillo is normally quite absent from his fiction – a spectral intelligence. Underworld is his most demanding novel but it is also his most transparent. It has an undertow of personal pain, having to do with fateful irreversibilities in a young life – a register that DeLillo has never touched before. This isn’t Meet the Author. It is the earned but privileged intimacy that comes when you see a writer whole – what Leavis called the ‘sense of pregnant arrest’.
‘But the bombs were not released … The missiles remained in the rotary launchers. The men came back and the cities were not destroyed.’ Just so. Now that the cold war is gone, the planet becomes less ‘interesting’ in the Chinese sense (ancient animadversion: May you live in interesting times). But it isn’t every day, or even every decade, that one sees the ascension of a great writer. This means that from now on we will all be living in more interesting times. Which is my whole juxt.
New York Times Book Review October 1997
Even Later
The Actual by Saul Bellow*
Novelists don’t age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties. And novelists don’t age as slowly as poets, some of whom (Yeats for instance) just keep on singing, and louder sing for every tatter in their mortal dress. Novelists are stamina-merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour. They come good at thirty, they peak at fifty (the ‘canon’ is very predominantly the work of men and women in early middle age); at seventy, novelists are ready to be kicked upstairs. How many have managed to pace themselves through and beyond an eighth decade? Saul Bellow’s The Actual has a phrase for this kind of speculation: ‘cemetery arithmetic’. The new book also confirms the fact that Bellow, at eighty-two, has bucked temporal law.
And bucked it twice over, it may be. Fifteen years ago, I believed that Late Bellow, as a phase, had begun with The Dean’s December. The visionary explosiveness of Bellow’s manly noon (Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift) seemed to have hunkered down into a more pinched and wintry artistry; the air was thinner but also clearer, colder, sharper. Then came the unfailingly mordant and accurate Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. And then came More Die of Heartbreak, which now looks like yet another transitional work: a final visitation from the epic volubility of the past. The author had turned seventy. But this wasn’t Late Bellow. Late Bellow, or Even Later Bellow, was just about to crystallize.
In an essay of 1991 Bellow quoted Chekhov: ‘Odd, I have now a mania for shortness. Whenever I read my own or other people’s works it all seems to me not short enough.’ And he added: ‘I find myself emphatically agreeing with this.’ Later Bellow consists of three novellas (A Theft, The Bellarosa Connection, The Actual) and two short stories (Something to Remember Me By’ and By the St Lawrence’), the whole running to about 300 pages. Shortness, certainly, is to some extent enforced. And when one casts about for comparable examples of literary longevity (Singer? Welty? Pritchett?), one seems to be moving naturally and inevitably towards a realm of sparer utterance.
Of course, the picture may change all over again (see below). Pretty well the only useful sentence in the thoroughly superfluous memoir by Harriet Wasserman (Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow), the author’s former agent, reports the existence of two uncompleted novels, which may still emerge. And even that disclosure feels impertinent. When I reflect that the Wasserman volume (my proof copy has had the final section physically sheared out of it, doing little for its general deportment) is a mere look-see compared to James Atlas’s massive anatomy, the Life, due in 2000, I find that my protective instincts are strongly stirred. Among many other things, The Actual reminds us that the fiction is the actual, the truthful record. As its narrator, Harry Trellman, observes:
Your inwardness should be, deserves to be a secret about which nobody needs to get excited. Like the old gag. Q: ‘What’s the difference between ignorance and indifference?’ A: ‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’
Although Bellow has spoken of ‘the more or less pleasant lucidity’ attainable ‘at this end of the line’, it is not the kind of lucidity that deals in apothegms, admonitions, ‘answers’ (nobody expects to complete their feelings any more. They have to give up on closure. It’s just not available’). It All Adds Up was Bellow’s cheerful title for his collection of discursive prose, but the imaginative life allows for no confident aggregations. The author of Dangling Man (1944) was far more inclined to assert and propound than the author of The Actual. And whereas, for example, Mr Sammler’s Planet presented the Holocaust as a graspable historical event, The Bellarosa Connection refuses it all understanding. The story ‘By the St Lawrence’ contains a deeply apposite figure: ‘Intensive-care nurses had told him that the electronic screens monitoring his heart had run out of graphs, squiggles and symbols at last and, foundering, flashed out nothing but question marks.’ Later Bellow is a distillation, but not a distillation of wisdom. Capability has gone negative, confining itself to what can decently be said. These meditations are concerned with human attachments, most obviously or publicly the consanguinity peculiar to the Jews.
Confronted by the obsessive torments of a middle-European refugee, the narrator of Bellarosa silently advises: ‘Forget it. Go American.’ The advice is of course frivolous, a symptom of the ‘American puerility’ he detects in himself; but it’s a popular option. Ravaged and haunted, the surviving elders look on helplessly as their children submit to American lunkification, homogenized by a carnal culture. The Jews have a special centrality, reconferred on them by the twentieth century; but now they are shedding their peculiarity, their ties of remembrance, and their talent for the transcendental. Towards the end of Bellarosa the narrator encounters just such a Jew-gone-native, who mocks him for his old-style sentiments. The last page beautifully registers the weight of what is being lost:
Suppose I were to talk to him about the roots of memory in feeling – about the themes that collect and hold the memory; if I were to tell him what retention of the past really means. Things like: ‘If sleep is forgetting, forgetting is also sleep, and sleep is to consciousness what death is to life. So that the Jews ask even God to remember, “Yiskor Elohim.” ’
God doesn’t forget, but your prayer requests him particularly to remember your dead.
Loved ones can absent themselves without dying, and Later Bellow is adorned with many variations of amorous regret, grief, nostalgia, and thought-experiment. Seen from both points of view, by the way: let me drown out certain fashionable murmurs by trumpeting the assurance that no one writes more inwardly about women than Saul Bellow. Look at Sorella, look at Mrs Adletsky; look at Clara Velde, from A Theft, fully incarnated in a single sentence (students of literary economy should examine its comma): ‘The mouth was very good but stretched extremely wide when she grinned, when she wept.’ While you love, that which is innate in you becomes malleable; so love shapes you. In ‘Something to Remember Me By’ and ‘By the St Lawrence’ this shaping goes all the way back to moments of youthful awakening, qualified by a complementary accession to death. The con-girl seductress, the child in the coffin, the wait outside the bordello, the body on the railtrack: Bellow makes us feel the mortal hold of these raw configurations.
The Actual is even more scrupulously written than its immediate predecessors. We notice the ‘dried urban gumbo of dark Lake Street’, we glimpse a silhouette ‘in the gray bosom of the limo TV’; an ancient billionairess is ‘like a satin-wrapped pupa’. But after eighty years of passionate cohabitation, the author’s relationship with language has evolved into something like sibling
harmony. The desire for vatic speech is undimmed, yet no tiffs, no party pieces, accompany it. Bellow’s prose remains a source of constant pleasure because of its manifest immunity to all false consciousness. It plays very straight. ‘There is great variety in my dreams,’ one Bellow hero confides. ‘I have anxious dreams, amusing dreams, desire dreams, symbolic dreams. There are, however, dreams that are all business and go straight to the point.’ Later Bellow is something like that: all business.
As I was putting this piece to bed, the launch issue of a literary magazine arrived on my desk: The Republic of Letters, edited by Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford. Its lead piece is a new Bellow story, entitled ‘View from Intensive Care’ and tagged ‘from a work in progress’.* Picking up on certain details in ‘By the St Lawrence’, it describes a medical close call with heroic, terrifying, and near-comical detachment: ‘Taking note is part of my job-description. Existence is – or was – the job.’
Well, existence still is the job. And while the new story increases the scope of Later Bellow, nothing qualitative has changed. There is a great deal going on in these short fictions, tangled plots (for tangled lives) and intense formal artistry. But what accounts for their extraordinary affective power? When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page – stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author. Or, in this case, with something even more fundamentally his. Bellow’s first name is a typo: that ‘a’ should be an ‘o’.
Observer August 1997
* See also this page-this page.
* ‘View from Intensive Care’ became part of Ravelstein (2000). Ravelstein is a full-length novel. It is also, in my view, a masterpiece with no analogues. The world has never heard this prose before: prose of such tremulous and crystallized beauty. (Incidentally, the James Atlas biography, mentioned earlier, turned out to be a moral disaster; hostile, inaccurate and ill-written, it is a dramatized inferiority complex lasting 600 pages.)