a highly subjective review of Underworld

A few days ago, I finished Don DeLillo’s Underworld. It took me over a month to finish, and now, looking back, that entire month is like a gaping hole in my memory, a void, one of those paranormal loss-of-time events almost, because I barely remember a thing.

I don’t blame Underworld. I blame myself.

I've got more than a few bad habits, like smoking almost a pack a day, eating whole bags of candy in one sitting, biting my nails to the quick, chewing at the tips of my fingers, drinking coffee after midnight, staying up way too late, being an absolute terror in the mornings, compulsively watching YouTube videos that I don’t even like just to post snarky comments, picking scabs to the point that they take months to heal, picking my nose, eating boogers, drinking straight out of the carton, throwing recyclables in the garbage because I’m too lazy to go through the whole can-crushing process, a seriously unhealthy relationship with digital entertainment of all kinds, sudden-onset procrastination when some mandatory task presents itself, eating only like three types of food because I refuse to try new things, and all sorts of other stuff. But the bad habit that’s most applicable here, which is sort of a blessing and a curse in some ways, is my tendency to finish every book that I start regardless of quality, because that’s exactly what happened with Don DeLillo’s Underworld, a book that, in hindsight, was a colossal waste of my time, like I could have read three other books in the time it took to read all 900 or so pages of Underworld, and the worst thing about it is, I barely remember what happened in the book. In fact, I’m pretty sure nothing happened at all.

I don't know why I do this to myself, the whole force-myself-to-finish-things thing, because it's a catch-22 really, a situation that ends up making me feel like shit whether I finish the thing or not. There's also a sunk-time thing going on, too. But mostly, when I tell myself I'm going to do something, it becomes like a matter of personal responsibility for me, a self-inflicted obligation almost. So when I don't finish something, it feels like I’ve broken some sort of oath, which makes me feel like a failure on some level, as if I can't keep my word, which makes me feel like a dishonest, lazy person. Yet, when I do force myself to complete things, I’m always doing it begrudgingly, and there’s never a feeling of satisfaction afterward, because I’m very aware that I only have a limited amount of time on this planet and not everything is actually worth completing, and so every minute spent doing one thing sacrifices time for another thing, so when I force myself to complete things I don't want to complete I end up feeling like I've wasted a bunch of time. And even though I know the outcome of the whole finishing-things-I-don’t-really-want-to-finish thing, I still persist with finishing the thing because of the whole aforementioned personal-responsibility thing, and this, combined with feeling that I’m effectively wasting my time, creates a sort of dissonance in my mind, a dissonance that's present not only when completing the thing but also upon completion of the thing, so I can’t win. This is one of the many types of psychic torture I inflict upon myself daily. Underworld being just one of many such cases.

Underworld itself is one of those works of literary fiction that functions as a sort of commentary on twenty-first-century, first-world society. It takes place mostly in New York City between the 1950s and 90s, chronicling the life of a man named Nick Shay, who killed someone in his delinquent youth, then went through the justice system and came out reformed as an executive for a waste management company, which is supposed to be some profound comment about something, but what that something is is elusive to me, as the novel attempts to wrestle with multiple themes but is so overwrought that it only ends up wrestling with itself and the reader.

The themes, from what I gathered, are garbage, literal garbage, like waste, refuse, trash, but also spiritual garbage, like dealing with life-altering mistakes and bad habits and harmful obsessions and aversions to change. Another major theme is human interconnectedness, like how everyone is connected, how every human action has an equal and opposite reaction, even though you might not be aware of it, and also how six degrees of Kevin Bacon applies not only to Kevin Bacon but to everyone you meet, like how you could probably connect yourself by association to someone on the other side of the planet when considering that the people you interact with also interact with other people and so on down the chain. “There are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered and linked, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password—world without end, amen.” And the novel’s theme of garbage supports this theme of interconnectedness as well, as DeLillo is keen to point out that one person’s garbage is often recycled into another person’s cardboard box or plastic bottle or whatever, highlighting that we are even connected by our own waste. Also baseball. Baseball is a big theme. In fact, you could probably make the argument that the main character of the novel is not Nick Shay but actually a baseball, a literal baseball, the baseball hit by New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thomson at the Polo Grounds in New York City on October 3, 1951, dubbed the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” because the novel sort of follows this baseball chronologically from owner to owner, starting from when a young boy named Cotter Martin obtains the ball at the ball game itself, which is told in a beautifully written novella-length chapter at the start of the book, to when Cotter’s father steals the ball from his son and sells it for rent money, after which the ball exchanges hands multiple times, each of those hands belonging to a different character in the book, so there are a lot of interconnected characters associated with this specific baseball. There’s Nick Shay, Cotter Martin, his father Manx Martin, Nick’s wife, who’s like a heroin addict or something, Nick’s wife’s secret lover Brian, Nick Shay’s secret lover Klara, who’s a “reclamation artist” that turns trash into art which obviously ties into the themes of garbage and interconnectedness, then there’s this gay graffiti artist who might have AIDS, then there’s Sister Edgar, a nun whose consciousness gets uploaded into the World Wide Web after death or something, then there are like twelve other characters who are so underdeveloped that I could barely tell them apart. Oh, and also fictional versions of J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, and Lenny Bruce, the latter of whom functions as a sort of comic-relief sage who does subversive stand-up comedy highlighting the existential dread and paranoia of living through the Cold War, ending most of his raunchy routines with “WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE.” And all of these characters are connected in some way through the Bobby Thomson baseball, which all serves to reinforce the novel’s Zen-like central theme of human interconnectedness, which is basically the only thing I like about the book. And, considering that Underworld was written late in Don DeLillo’s career, when he was like 60 or something, this Zen-like theme of interconnectedness kind of reinforces my suspicion that most philosophically minded writers, given enough time, tend to lean toward Buddhism. And if you don’t believe me, see the late work of J.D. Salinger, David Foster Wallace, Jack Kerouac, and now Don DeLillo, because, despite the fact that Buddhism isn’t mentioned even once in the novel, Underworld is essentially a Buddhist text.

But that alone does not save Underworld from being a boring, overwrought waste of my time, unfortunately.

And despite the novel’s name, the Mafia is not involved here. The book is not about crime, although crime does happen. The name Underworld is more like a symbol for what’s going on underneath the surface of society, how underneath everyone is connected, both spiritually and metaphysically, and maybe the name is also a reference to the World Wide Web, which is also used as a symbol for human interconnectedness, a point DeLillo clumsily shoehorns into the epilogue, which is one of the few highlights of the book, alongside the opening baseball chapter, and this one late chapter that reveals the circumstances around how Nick Shay killed a guy, a scene that did indeed make me put the book down and be like, “damn.” The rest of the book is a series of short vignettes that jump from one time period to another in random order, which only serves to make the novel more confusing than it needs to be. These vignettes follow one of the many dull characters as they just go about their normal lives talking to each other about stuff, which results in a reading experience that goes something like, “nothing is happening but surely something must happen soon because, according to literary critics, Underworld is a masterpiece, so I’m going to keep reading because surely there must be a big payout coming up here soon,” but, spoilers, there’s no payout. There’s no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. Nothing fucking happens. All the excitement is frontloaded into the beginning of the book, when Cotter Martin, who only appears in the first chapter despite being the novel's only likable and compelling character, obtains the baseball. That’s pretty much it. There’s your excitement. The rest is so dull that I can’t even recount it here, because, frankly, I do not remember. The majority of Underworld is just dialogue exchanges between characters who talk past each other about literal garbage and other topics loosely related to the overarching themes of the book. And, due to the nature of this quote-unquote “story” being told in a disjointed, out-of-sync manner, there’s no real build-up or climax or whatever, just lots of pretty words with supposedly deep subtext.

As I read through Underworld, I was struck by just how much it resembles David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, in its length, its number of characters, its fragmented storytelling, its critique of modern society, and its story that loosely gravitates around a central object. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Infinite Jest was inspired by Underworld, given that, if you check the Underworld Wikipedia page, one of the only cited pieces of praise is actually a quote from David Foster Wallace himself. “This novel is (1) a great and significant piece of art fiction; (1a) not like any novel I've read; (2) your best work ever, so far; (3) a huge reward for someone who's read all your previous stuff because it seems to be at once a synthesis and a transfiguration—a transcendence—of your previous stuff; (4) a book in which nothing is skimped or shirked or tossed off or played for the easy laugh, and where (it seems to me) you've taken some truly ballsy personal risks and exposed parts of yourself and hit a level of emotion you've never even tried for elsewhere (at least as I've read your work).” But the difference between Underworld and Infinite Jest, frankly, is that Infinite Jest is actually good, whereas Underworld is just not. Infinite Jest is sprinkled with exciting moments, occasionally beautiful prose, outrageous situations that capture your attention, short stories within stories that cause you to put the book down and stare off into space thinking about shit, spot-on future-sight prescience, well-developed characters that you actually grow attached to, and comedic moments that break up all the existential dread, all written by an author who could speak in multiple subcultural languages. Whereas Underworld is just like, “here’s a baseball game for 100 pages, here’s people making supposedly profound observations for 700 pages, here’s a nuke going off and a nun getting trapped in a computer or something for 30 pages, the end,” written in dreary prose by a 60-year-old boomer who lost touch with modern culture decades ago and is now interested solely in baseball and writing, desperately trying to marry these two loves to produce some sort of grand meaning-of-life type statement that vaguely hits on conclusions Buddhism already uncovered centuries ago, all of which basically amounts to a 900-page ramble, likely because DeLillo’s editor probably wasn’t ballsy enough to be like, “OK, grandpa, time to put the pen down.” And this is obviously true when reading the epilogue, which feels tacked on as an afterthought because, one, it’s written in an altogether different tone from the rest of the book, and two, it reads more like a thesis paper than an actual part of the novel, almost as if it were written solely because, after finishing the main bulk of the novel, DeLillo realized that he had failed to sufficiently make any sort of cohesive point whatsoever, so instead he just decided to tell us the point point-blank, meaning the bulk of Underworld functions as literary masturbation while the epilogue functions as a sort of post-nut clarity.

To me, a long novel is like a rainbow, a beautiful, awe-inspiring, mysterious thing, and you kind of expect there to be a pot of gold at the end, but there’s no pot of gold at the end of Underworld, only a wastebin full of garbage, in keeping with the major theme of the book. And, in comparison with other long novels I’ve read, notably Moby Dick and Infinite Jest, two books I enjoyed overall but also have grievances with, at least there were nuggets of gold sprinkled along the arcs of those rainbows, whereas in Underworld there are just a few gold flakes here and there, but not enough to justify the journey.

I want to caveat all this with the following disclaimer. I have a deep respect for all writers. It takes serious dedication and love-of-the-craft to write anything, especially a novel, especially one that’s almost 900 pages long. Underworld is an incredibly impressive book, from this standpoint. I also want to caveat by saying that, despite throwing around claims like “Underworld is just not good” and other criticisms, the qualitative measures of “good” and “bad” are basically stupid and almost entirely subjective. As such, my opinion of Underworld is just that, an opinion, a stupid, subjective opinion. I am not trying to make any objective claims about the quality of Underworld here. I am probably not even qualified to critique a work of this caliber to begin with, as I have not written a novel myself, and I’m also not that great of a writer. I’m also not that smart. I just have a high-school-level grasp of English vocabulary and grammar, opinions, and a tendency to ramble using far more words than necessary, as evidenced by this poor excuse for a book review. What I’m trying to say is, there’s a good chance that Underworld just went over my head. I probably just didn’t get it. And since I begrudgingly forced myself to read it, I was probably not in the best mindset to fairly judge the material when I was reading it. But, if I’m being fair, Underworld’s themes are interesting, and the way it ties those themes into baseball and trash is clever. But the whole thing just kind of fell flat for me, likely because these are things I’ve already thought about on some level, so there was nothing new for me here, at least nothing new that I picked up on, keeping in mind that I’m not that smart and that this book probably just went over my head.

To be honest, I didn’t even want to write about Underworld. I was just going to move on. But then, after considering that I had spent over a month with the book, living in its world, breathing its air, getting to know what little there is to know about its incredibly dull characters, the sunk-time fallacy sunk in, and I felt obligated to write something about it, otherwise, I would feel like I’ve wasted a bunch of time.

So here I am, making up for lost time, inflicting that old psychic torture on myself again, finishing something I don’t want to finish, effectively wasting my time, writing the last sentence of a highly subjective review of Underworld.