Wednesday 1 July 2009

Underworld by Don DeLillo is long but worth a read

Don DeLillos's Underworld is as relevant and valid today as it was at time of publication some ten years ago. In that time so much has happened and yet precious little has changed.

Underworld, Don De LilloI acquired Underworld by Don DeLillo over 10 years ago as a result of having studied and enjoyed the author's book White Noise at university. I desperately wanted to read more work of this person who seemed to have his fingers on the pulse of our era as well as a good grasp of the past events, both small and sizeable, that helped to form the present. He also seemed to dislay an almost uncanny insight into the future.

DeLillo has the magical ability to present the varying strands of our current ethos, culture, lifestyles and ideologies in succinct form without foregoing any of the vital minutiae of daily life that make up these things. One minute his characters are discussing, quite seriously, the merits of wearing sunscreen in the desert, for example, and in the very same sentence or paragraph we realise that they are also commenting on the atomisation of society at large. The author manages to do this without any of the usual jarring gaps in flow and avoids any sense of disconnect. The books - all those I've had the good fortune to read - flow like understated but crucially zeitgeist movies - think American Dream and perhaps sometimes Donny Darko.

Reading DeLillo's work (I can't bring myself to use the words 'novel' or 'story' as they seem too trite descriptions for works so intrinsically linked to real life) is like watching a perfect mix of documentary and fictionalized drama that blends so well it is almost impossible to tell what is 'real' and what isn't. In this way his work is simply a mirror on our lives. If you cannot find yourself, or at least a part of yourself in his work, perhaps your existence is questionably.

Back to Underworld, which I wanted to read and attempted to at least hit the 100 page mark before giving up (as advised by one of my English tutors at school) several times over the last ten years. The size of the book overwhelmed me however and in conjunction with the highly americanised subject of the first chapters - baseball - which I felt no desire to even try to relate to, meant that I quit after only a few pages several times over. Size (and sport) are not everything however and honestly, I think I was just not ready for Underworld. Not yet ready to understand its simple complexities and appreciate the subject matter from a well balanced distance matched with the closeness of experience.

Until late last year. Now I am finally ready to devour this book in a way I could not have done ten years ago. I have just passed the half way mark (in page terms) and am as excited about it as I was at the start. The characters are familiarly intriguing, their personalities forming, dissolving, adapting before my eyes as DeLillo takes his readers backwards and forwards in time. The events of over 50 years played and replayed from different angles with clues and signs dished out here and there. I feel as though I've been given special privilege to wallow through restricted archives on vast micro-fiche, piles of newspapers, audio and film reels and diaries.

The specifics of Underworld's era, from Cold War fever, J Edgar Hoover's paranoia through 70's alternative counter-culture, consumerist ignorance and the shameful wastefulness of post war periods right through to the present, are as relevant today, if not more so, than they were in the late 90s. I would highly recommend this book as both fascinating fiction and documentary research of why we are where we are today.