I’m reading Underworld by Don DeLillo. I’ve been reading Underworld by Don DeLillo for about three years now. I started it what feels like an aeon ago, fell away from it, picked it back up last month, and am currently struggling through the verbiage, a sluggish paragraph at a time.
I sort of love it. But it sort of leaves me entirely cold. I can tell he’s an exemplary writer, and there’s so much nuance and exploration of subtle truths in there. But maybe I don’t think he’s a good writer at all - this is the second book of his that I’ve appreciated from afar, or maybe felt I should appreciate, without any of it connecting with me on an emotional level.
Not that his prose isn’t suffused with beauty:
“The rim clouds took on a chromium edge and the high sky was still an easy noonish blue. But the pit went dark in a hurry, the vast plastic liner wind-lapped and making the eeriest sort of music, just outside the wave-fold of nature, and the surface was indigo now, still faintly sky-streaked, washed by gradations of shade and motion. We stood a moment watching and then went back to the car.”
And his dialogue is taut, sizzling, low-key exhilarating. But I’m not really following what’s going on, or why it’s important. There’s someone who works for a waste-disposal agency, and a lot of musing about how waste, trash, excrement, points to something profound and corporeal and hidden in plain view about us all and our place in the world. There’s a baseball that was hit to win the World Series in 1951 that is followed through the novel, a kid grabbing it during the game, his father taking it off him, a collector searching for it in the 90s, something in the 70s - and lots of subtext about sports and achievement and collecting and owning and wanting and What it Means to Be American, which American writers are always trying to answer, which is far less interesting when you’re not yourself American and don’t see why they always have to bang on about themselves so much. There are about fifty more characters who I’ve been introduced to in vignettes so far unattached to anything else, and subsequently forgotten. And there’s someone cruising down freeways murdering people in his car.
That actually all sounds like the kind of novel I would adore. But something about it is so theoretical, so distanced. It’s long, and it requires effort to read - every passage begins in medias res, with characters you can’t remember, pursuing needs that aren’t at all obvious, and after a ponderous few pages you cut away again, unsure of what to make of what you’ve read.
I mean, it all makes sense on the page, and sounds meaningful and powerful and strong. But I’m struggling to transfer any of that from the book into my experience of real life. It’s like it’s encoded with wisdom, but wisdom for an alien lifeform that processes information differently to myself.
Maybe I’m just not smart enough. But I think I get most of it, that’s not the problem - I feel the depths that he’s mining. They’re just cerebral depths, always discrete and unrelated to the heart.
I’ll carry on reading, regardless. Many important works of art only fully connect with me once they’re done, once I’ve experienced them and taken in their whole and felt my own whole being shift to accommodate what they express.
I was just looking for, but couldn’t find, a quote about viewing art. Can’t remember who said it. The gist is that we don’t see art, we see according to art. It changes our viewpoint, changes us, in a very real sense, as we consume it. So far seeing according to Underworld is a lonely, removed way of seeing. But perhaps there will be immense worth in that, once I’m through.
Anyway, that’s enough of my evening spent tapping away. Now it’s time for bed and book.
......
Music: Barracuda, by John Cale.
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