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December 1998

Underworld by Don DeLillo

Book reviews of Don DeLillo's Underworld and John Irving's A Widow for One Year

Underworld**** by Don DeLillo. Scribner, New York, 1997. For Europeans it may be just another game, but baseball is the ultimate American sport. Nowhere are victories sweeter, passions hotter or defeats more bitter. Don DeLillo, who has his finger on the pulse of America, has recognized the extraordinary power of the sport. The enigma of defeat and it’s consequences are what fascinate him, as he explained in a recent interview. Not surprisingly then, it is one of the most thrilling moments in baseball history that opens DeLillo’s masterwork Underworld. In a famous baseball game on October 3, 1951, a sensational homerun drove the highly favored Brooklyn Dodgers to defeat by the New York Giants. The next day, the New York Times called it “the shot heard ’round the world.” But the story of the instantly legendary homerun had to share the front page with another historic event: the Russians had successfully executed their first atomic test that very same day. A sports competition had been decided, but the nuclear arms race had just begun. When DeLillo saw the cover page with these two articles, identical in length and layout, beside each other, it caused “a hush in my mind,” he says. That key moment inspired one of the great novels of the decade. The 60-page prologue, a brilliant account of the game, is only a foretaste of the 800 pages to come. Underworld is a masterful study of the American mind, rich in detail and beautifully written. In his eleventh novel, DeLillo says, the Cold War furnishes a subplot for the novel. In slow motion, or at high speed, he paces through four decades of American history, weaving fact and fiction, individual and global events, symbolism and anecdote into a sweeping picture of our age. Through a dozen main characters he tells about the changes in life and perception, about the dark underside of things – the underworld. Tying the multiple characters and loosely connected stories together is that homerun baseball, which arcs through space and time. What begins on a Bronx baseball field in 1951 ends in cyberspace some forty years later. DeLillo recalls an era with its traumas of conspiracy, assassination, chemical waste and nuclear threat, and yet he remarks, “The novelist is creating a dream that’s an antidote to history’s nightmare.” Which may be why this colossal stream of words finally ends in a single word, sitting alone on the last line. Peace. A Widow for one year** by John Irving Random House, 1998. A Widow for One Year is the tryptich tale of the life of writer Ruth Cole. The novel opens with Ruth at age four, her parents burdened by the grief which has taken the place of their two teenage sons, killed some years earlier. Ruth’s father, a famous children’s writer, buries his sorrow beneath countless affairs and rigorous rounds of squash. Ruth’s mother fleetingly takes a young lover, Eddie, whose chief attraction is his resemblence to her dead sons. Ruth’s mother disappears, thus setting the stage for the developments of the next three decades. We next meet Ruth in 1990, now an acclaimed novelist, in her mid-thirties, with a knack for choosing dreadful boy-friends. She is a wonderfully believable character – a tribute to Irving’s powers of observation and imagination. Ruth’s relationship with her father, her best friend, and the memory of her still-absent mother are explored in credible detail. She begins a successful relationship with her editor, Allan, whom she marries rather abruptly and the couple soon have a son. When Allan dies, Ruth is compelled to confront loss and reassess her relationship with her mother as an adult. In the final section, Ruth is involved in a grisly murder case in Amsterdam, the resolution of which involves a policeman, Harry, who ultimately ends her widowhood. Irving’s use of haunting phrases and imagery unexpectedly trips circuits in the reader’s mind, much as memory functions, giving the story an astonishing plausibility absent from less well-crafted fiction. The characters are so utterly real that the reader is apt to miss the careful study that underlies their creation. Although marred by a few appalling clichés, the writing is servicable and admirably succinct. Clearly Irving’s strength lies in storytelling and characterization, rather than elegantly wrought phrasing. Convenient coincidences, rather than ingenious plotting, account for most character interactions. In a lesser work, Irving’s obvious contrivances might tax the reader’s patience, but such is the narrative drive of this story that such flaws are readily forgiven. <<< by valerie belz

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