I found the novel at one of the book sales I troll from time to time and put it on the bottom shelf with the rest of my collection of recent finds. When Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom was published late last summer, I could not help reading the reviews, which I usually avoid until after I’ve read a book. The reviews of Freedom, I believe, were the result of an orchestrated PR campaign. One – in the New York Times – declared Freedom “the novel of the century,” which is a strange comment given that the century was only 10 years old when the book was published. A gush like that, of course, must be followed with a bit of brutality, referred to by the PR team as “David vs. Goliath,” and it was. A review in The Atlantic criticized Freedom for its childish writing (I disagree) and the novel’s lack of movement, of progress, of development (I really disagree). These characters and the landscape they occupy, the reviewer of Freedom wrote, don’t evolve. It’s like they’re all living in a world created by Don DeLillo. Don DeLillo and his books, it seems, are prone to being included in sweeping statements about the state of literature, the state of the American novel, the state of what we think of ourselves and what we’ve become and so on and so forth. Though rarely explained, he is frequently mentioned.
Here are some things from Underworld. The Giants beat the Dodgers in 1951 and went to the World Series. A homerun was hit into the stands. Many lives were arranged, more or less, around the ball itself, searching for it, paying for it, snatching it, stealing it, worshipping it, tossing it, accidentally, sort of, into the trash. Getting rid of trash is an enormous challenge, so much so that you might call it a theme (I am not good at themes, themes are my weakness, so forgive me for not being more definitive). There is nuclear power, and Vietnam, and all those retired B52s parked out in the desert somewhere (California or Arizona). J. Edgar Hoover is involved in much of this, as are Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleeson. A boy sits on a roof in the Bronx and listens to the baseball games on KMOX, which is, oddly enough, “the voice of Saint Louis.” Another boy reacts in horror as his genius manifests itself in his ability to beat any and all, it seems, at chess. A grainy movie of the Kennedy assassination is shown. A nun becomes obsessed with a graffiti artist. A woman beads sweaters to earn extra money, although there’s much more to it than that. A man begins shooting people at close range on the highways of Texas and becomes a celebrity of sorts. The number 13 rises to the surface over and over again, as does the Lucky Strikes logo. A father disappears.
Underworld is 827 pages long, and on each and every one of those pages there was at least one sentence that was so captivating – to me, for various reasons – that I read it again. Here, just for fun, are a couple of my favorites:
“There’s always a clock somewhere that’s stopping,” Marvin said morosely. [page 306]
And: She is part of me now, total and consoling. And it is not a sadness to acknowledge that she had to die before I could know her fully. It is only a statement of the power of what comes after. [page 804]
The prologue of Underworld is 60 pages of the most engrossing writing I’ve read in a long while. It’s the baseball game, recalled and reenacted through the eyes and souls of several characters, the most intriguing of whom is a black boy named Cotter, who has skipped school and jumped the turnstile to get into the game. It is Cotter who actually gets the ball. Cotter has a breathtaking understanding of motion, of color and class, of the roles he plays and how to bend and meld them to his advantage. And after those first 60 magical pages, he is never heard from again.
As I was reading the last 20 pages of Underworld, I started wondering after the novel’s main point, and for me it came in the form of a question. Nick Shay, who is the closest thing to a main character, is an executive in the waste disposal industry. He does some terrible things, of course, including dirty dealings with an outfit in the then-collapsing Soviet Union. At the same time, his heart, for the most part, is in his marriage, in his relationship with his children and his grandchildren, in his life-long struggle with the disappearance of his father, who left him, his brother the chess player and their mother the beader, to fend for themselves. So here’s the question I was left with: Do his good traits soften the edges of his bad, or do his bad traits chip away at his more honorable characteristics?
It’s a worthwhile question, to be sure, but here’s the end of what I have to say about Underworld. Good writing is worth its weight in gold as far as I’m concerned, but if you’re going to invite people along for 827 pages, speaking only for myself, I need a bit of connection, some coherence, something, anything really, that sustains. Those elements, for me, never presented themselves.
