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Nick's infatuation with the idea of loss is one of the myriad subjects offered by Underworld; insofar as the novel has a hero, Nick is the man. But plot synopsis, always a suspect enterprise when applied to first-class fiction--Ulysses, an ad salesman's day in Dublin--fails utterly to convey what DeLillo is up to in this book. For example, it is faithful to the imagined facts of the matter to report that Nick "eventually" buys the Thomson baseball but a misrepresentation of the novel's unfolding veer and flow. On the pages, Nick's purchase occurs relatively early, not so very long after the stunning prologue. Because after Thomson's blast, the bulk of Underworld jumps forward and then runs in reverse from the early 1990s to the day after the game. DeLillo is offering nothing less than a countdown (ten, nine, eight...) of a merciful fizzle, of the cold war from its demise, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, back to that moment of infectious innocent exuberance under an unseen mushroom cloud on a fall afternoon in the Polo Grounds. The subject of Underworld is how we got from there to here and what happened to us along the way.
This premise, or promise, is audacious and preposterous. And DeLillo delivers the real goods. Several conventional novels, unconventionally told, run through Underworld. There is Nick's story and that of his younger brother Matt, plus an account of Klara Sax, a Bronx housewife in 1951 who later becomes a famous artist. DeLillo surrounds these people with a host of other characters vociferously trying to make sense out of the times of their lives. Some--many, come to think of it--seem crazy, like the collector Marv Lundy, who believes that the birthmark on Mikhail Gorbachev's head is really the shape of Latvia and foretells the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But what is crazy, Underworld insistently inquires, given the context of the past five decades, when people learned how to blow up the world and then, unaccountably, did not, at least not so far? "Everything's connected"--the mantra of both paranoiacs and artists--runs throughout Underworld. Nearly everyone in the novel says or thinks it, including J. Edgar Hoover, who reappears as a guest, this time only fictionally, at the Black & White Ball that Truman Capote threw at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan on Nov. 29, 1966. "It's all linked," Hoover tells his second in command, about the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. "The war protesters, the garbage thieves, the rock bands, the promiscuity, the drugs, the hair."
They are all in UNDERWORLD, and much more besides. A short history of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 as traced through DeLillo's imagined creations of Lenny Bruce's night-club monologues. Repeated motifs, as in classical music or jazz: photographs of Thomson and Branca posing with pretty much all the American Presidents since Eisenhower. The same people, places and things keep turning up: Jayne Mansfield, Greenland, orange juice, the eerie recurrence of the number 13. (Ralph Branca wore it on his uniform. Uranium 238 is the crucial element in an atom bomb; add up those numbers and see what you get.) Amazingly, everything in Underworld does connect. Is this novel a vindication of paranoia or a critique of the human hunger for patterns?