Don Delillo

Don Delillo (born 1936) is a novelist people think has something important to say about America in the second half of the twentieth century. Critics are divided about his books but some love them, and last year one European publication proclaimed him the greatest living American novelist.

I recently listened to two Delillo novels, White Noise (1985) and Underworld (1997). I didn't love either book but I found something about them intriguing, and I kept going partly to get a sense of why Delillo is such a famous interpreter of my own time.

White Noise won the National Book Award for fiction, but I have to say that I didn't really get it. The story concerns a university professor of Hitler Studies who has been married five times to four women and lives with a family chock full of half- and step-siblings. He makes a friend on campus, a new professor of pop culture who teaches a whole class on product labels. It's all rather pointless and meandering until the Airborn Toxic Event. This is a railyard spill of a chemical called Nyodene Derivative that eventually leads to the evacuation of the whole county and may have fatally poisoned our Hitler Studies professor. It's hard for him or us to know, though, because nobody in authority ever gives a straight answer to an important question. The evacuation prompted by the ATE is managed by SIMULVAC, an entity devoted to simulating disasters as training exercises; why they are in charge of what seems to be an actual emergency is, well, a good question. The last section of the book concerns an experimental drug that is supposed to ease the fear of death. 

I finished White Noise without having any idea what it was about, but it did leave me with one clear message: Trust No One. Another message, it seems to me, was that it is hard to know what is important or real and what is not. Do the details of product labels really say something important about America? Does television? Do the movies? What would it mean to "say something important" anyway? Is the Airborn Toxic Event a sham, a disaster, or something meaningful mainly because of how people feel about it and react to it?

Underworld begins with a very long chapter describing a baseball game in 1951, a playoff between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Giants won the game in the ninth inning when Bobby Thompson hit a home run that some sportswriter dubbed The Shot Heard Round the World. Among the fans at this game was J. Edgar Hoover, who was hanging out with Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and restauranteur/mob front man Toots Shor. (So far as I can find out, this is true.) Delillo gives us pages of dialogue among the four men, and I was stunned by how real it felt; it seemed to me exactly what those men would have said at a baseball game, each given a perfect voice. Somewhere in the middle of this I asked myself, why? Why is Delillo using his obvious talents to recreate inane chatter among a bunch of Rat Pack celebrities?

And this is one of my reactions to Delillo: ok, this guy can write, but what is he writing about? 

One of the themes in Underground is the Bobby Thompson homerun ball, which a baseball fanatic devoted decades of his life to tracking down. And just when I was thinking, gee, this is probably a metaphor for people who obessively research events like the Kennedy assassination, some character says, "this guy reminded me of people who obsessively research the Kenneday assassination." Thanks, Don, guess you didn't want us to miss that one.

After the excessive prologue we meet our main character, a kid from the Bronx named Nick Shay. We pick him up in the 1990s, then gradually work backwards through his life toward 1951. Delillo was trying to do a thing that is very hard to do, to mix up a novel about family relationships with some kind of essay or thought exercise about America. It only sort of works, and it goes on for a long time, leaving you (or me, anyway) wondering if it was worth it.

In the 90s Nick is an executive at a waste disposal company in Phoenix. Through him we are introduced to another of Underworld's themes: waste. We hear about enormous landfills, deep salt domes where nuclear waste is buried, rumors of "ghost ships" that sail the world for years, changing their names and registrations, searching for some nation that will accept their cargoes of toxic waste. We meet a "garbage guru" who says civilization arose to manage waste, and a sculptor who is recycling 230 surplus B-52s into a gigantic work of art. And waste, it seems, stands in for all the other enormous systems that govern our world, all the things that happen out of our sight so we can have our nice little lives.

At one point Nick attends a convention of solid waste executives that turns out to be sharing the hotel with a convention of swingers. This struck me as typical Delillo: a keen eye for the absurdities of our world, but not much of a story and only frustrating hints at what he is trying to tell us.

We meet a character who designs nuclear weapons at a secret facility in the desert – Delillo loves secret facilities in the desert – who is troubled by guilt but can't get anyone else to take him seriously. He tries to talk to his family, and they tell him to man up. He tries to talk to an anti-nuclear protester but she won't even look at him. He goes out into the desert to think but resolves nothing. He seems to be a good guy, and the other people at the secret facility seem like good guys, and they do illegal drugs and mock the system in other ways. Somehow, though, they are building ultimate evil.

We meet an enthusiastic early 60s housewife who "can do things with gelatin that amaze." We hang out in 1970s New York where art world types try to survive the sanitation workers' strike, stop by a Civil Rights sit-in that becomes a police riot, visit a Madison Avenue advertising executive playing with atomic bomb themes, check out Lenny Bruce's comedy routine during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then back to a 1950s Italian neighborhood in the Bronx, where we get one of those loving evocations of an immigrant community that American novelists enjoy so much.

We eventually get to to a sort of culmination that didn't suprise me and doesn't seem to have surprised anyone else, either. But then in Delillo's world everything is controlled by systems and "information flows" that somehow connect secret facilities in the desert to suburban kitchens to comedy clubs to the Grassy Knoll to memorabilia collectors to Bobby Thompson to J. Edgar Hoover to the atomic bomb and back to a secret facility in the desert, so maybe surprises are pretty much impossible. 

There is a lot of impressive writing in Underworld, several remarkable scenes, some interesting people. But it doesn't cohere very well and as a description of America I found it opaque. Something is happening out there, but its exact nature is hidden from us. People may be good, or trying to be good, but some shadowy something diverts their efforts away from real truth or real happiness toward an anxious existence under the threat of annihilation. It occurred to me as I wrote that sentence that there isn't anyone particularly bad in either White Noise or Underworld. Sometimes they do bad things, but not from any deep maliciousness.

What is it all about?

Writers, Delillo once said, "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."

Sure, fine, whatever. But I could not tell you what Delillo really thinks about America beyond a vague paranoia and a sense that they, whoever they are, aren't telling us the truth. We aren't bad people, but somehow we are making a world full of evil. It's the system that is the problem.

But then, what would happen to us without the waste disposal system and the sewers and the electrical grid? 

Is the baseball thing supposed to suggest that we can figure things out if we strike out on our own quests for the truth? Or is the point is the murkiness, the shadowy vastness of history in motion that we simply can't grasp from within it? But history is already murky to me, and I didn't need an novelist to tell me that.

Beats me. I feel teased, really, like somebody who just listened to 40 hours of novels that he never managed to understand. 

I wonder if there is such a thing as a spirit or essence of an age that exists beyond the mass of details, and whether a novel could evoke it. Did the US really had some kind of central theme during the Cold War? I see a thousand different themes, some related to technological change, some to demography, some to feminism and Civil Rights, some to industrial decline, some to the media landscape. Did American minds, or at least a great many American minds, have something in common across the 1950 to 1990 period? If so, what was it? If that question has an answer, I don't think Don Delillo has a clue what it might be.