These are some of the central questions posed by Don DeLillo’s sprawling Underworld. The first one’s a whopper, isn’t it? “We” – the first person plural – begs an answer bigger than any one of us can offer, implying entire ecosystems of culture, parenting, questioning, and history (personal and otherwise). The solipsistic construction hints at uncertainty – about the fragile nature of memory, of consciousness itself. We’re revising our answer even as we try to compose it.

DeLillo’s question, asked by a Jesuit clergyman leading up to the novel’s conclusion, seems to be addressed directly to the reader, directly to America itself. To us. Who are we? Where did we come from? And what does the answer tell us about the future?

The characters in this book are assimilated into American culture through a whole host of teachers: priests, parents, mentors, friends, and lovers. For these children of the Cold War, math class was supplemented with bomb drills designed to instill a constant state of paranoia, replete with dog tags to facilitate identification in the event of an atomic attack by the Russians.

But what if your most important teachers – your parents – are missing, or drunk … or have just given up? This is Nick Shay’s dilemma, the central character in the novel, whose father walked out “for a pack of cigarettes” when Nick was only eleven. How is Nick to grow into a responsible young man without a father figure?

From the opening line, the answer lies in language itself: “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” Language is always coming to the rescue: as a defense against some apocalyptic menace (in the hip, slick, subversive riffing of Lenny Bruce during the Cuban Missile Crisis), a means to hide our deepest secrets from others, and thus hoard power (in the clipped, repressed inner dialogue of J. Edgar Hoover and his lover), a means of coping with adolescent angst (in the rich, textured banter bandied by Nick as he climbs his way out of a dead-end Bronx adolescence), and the moral compass guiding our interactions with others (in the contemplative nostalgia of an older, wiser Nick).

DeLillo is fascinated with film. Or, more accurately, with our cultural fascination with film. In the novel’s prologue, he steadily draws the reader into an historic baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, when Bobby Thompson hit “the shot heard ’round the world” off a pitch from Ralph Branca to deliver the National League pennant to the Giants (”The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”). Using an almost cinematic approach, he variously describes the “small reveries and desperations” of the crowd, the slow, graceful interplay between the baseball players, the gruff banter of the sports announcers calling the game, the comic ribbing between J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and immense nightclub owner Toots Shor.

By the time the game has built to its fabled conclusion, DeLillo is able to cut quickly from one major group of characters to another, move the action or emotion forward with a few short sentences, and build a perfect collage of “the body heat of a great city” just as it’s about to enter the long, paranoid tunnel of the Cold War. Glimpsed from the mid 1990’s, as the characters reflect on their often misguided youth of the 50’s and 60’s, the Cold War offers at least an organizing principle for our cultural tendency to violence.

But now that the Cold War is over – what organizing principle do we have left? Do we bury our secrets? Our nuclear waste, unseen evidence of so many decades of war and paranoia? Nick, the former Bronx tough turned Arizona toxic waste disposal executive, does just that. He trots across the globe, digs holes miles underground, buries bright vats of toxic waste, even travels to Russia to explode some depleted nuclear sludge (ironically) via a violent, subterranean explosion.

How do we know what we know? And how are we supposed to behave once we know it? DeLillo doesn’t give us the answers directly – he doesn’t preach or sermonize. What he does do is shine a light on our violent cultural impulses. There’s a kind of aspirational freedom promised by violence, which Nick, looking back, describes perfectly:

But “dumb-muscled” force isn’t the answer, and Nick knows this. He’s seen the deformed Russian toddlers, maimed by nuclear fallout, playing in the fields downwind from Chernobyl. He understands that being “a danger to others” is inconsistent with life in a free, civilized, society. Violence is instead a kind of catalyst towards self-knowledge, “pain is just another form of information”. The only way the dead-end, youthful Nick can aspire to some semblance of normal adulthood (the only way he can survive), is through a kind of baptism by fire. Violence will shatter him, and the resulting self-knowledge will remake him into responsible citizen: reformed, civilized, tamed.

After his crime, Nick learns to “see” the world literally at the feet of the Jesuits:

Nick “sees” the “rough slur”. Language shapes his impressions of the world. And later, as he begins to expand his vocabulary, he starts seeing a bigger picture:

I’ve only touched on a few of the themes DeLillo explores in this amazing, important (and massive, at 800+ pages) Great American Novel, DeLillo’s level best effort at trying “to make sense” of our cultural hangover from the Cold War. The intensity of the prose, the incisiveness of the insights into American history, and the depth of characterization here are unparalleled in literature (at least in my opinion). The fractured relationships between fathers and sons; the mythological home run baseball, pursued by Nick and others through the decades, serving as some symbol of a time that never really was; the symbiotic relationship between the creative and the warlike impulses; the redemptive power of art, of language … it’s all here.

And the final word of the novel? The one that allows us to rise above our dark, secret, checkered past and imagine a future free from secrets, free from conflict, free from the omnipresent dread of the Cold War?

“Peace.”

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

In a strangely retro New York City, Lila Mae Watson is the only black woman employed within the ranks of the Department of Elevator Inspectors. An “Intuitionist” who can telepathically sense whether or not an elevator is defective, Lila Mae has a perfect record; though the more powerful “Empiricists” in the Elevator Guild are none too pleased about the arcane techniques she employs, which were developed within the liberal campus of the Institute for Vertical Transport by a legendary figure known as James Fulton.

In Whitehead’s metropolis, the politics of verticality take center stage, and Lila Mae soon finds herself caught up in a high-stakes game of pork-barrel politics as played out between her boss, Chancre (head of the Elevator Guild and a proponent of Empiricism) and Orville Lever (an Intuitionist running for president of the Elevator Guild). When an elevator she’s recently inspected suddenly crashes, Lila Mae descends into a Machiavellian underworld where nothing is as it seems, populated by Irish thugs, muckraking journalists, mob bosses, and shifty-eyed campaign managers with questionable scruples.

Whitehead’s Gotham is a city that devours its denizens, with a skyline like “a row of broken teeth”. Buildings “vomit” workers and theatre-goers, “burp their charges out onto the pavement”, and serve to remind the reader that Lila Mae – indeed all of us – are a kind of fodder for the political-industrial machine we call America. Reading this book so closely on the heels of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, I was struck by the similarities between the two stories. Whitehead has taken up where Ellison left off, writing a modern-day sequel that attempts to show how difficult it can be to overcome centuries of racial segregation and slavery.

As Lila Mae begins to unravel the mystery of who’s framed her, her story unfolds in taut prose layered with suspense and double meaning. Whitehead’s central conceit is that “white people’s reality is built on what things appear to be – that’s the business of Empiricism. They judge … on how they appear when held up to the light …”

Thus the battle between “the business” of Empiricism and the more spiritual approach of Intuitionism becomes a battle for the soul of the Guild, the city, and the future of the nation.

Whitehead’s sentences are polished to perfection. He describes a building superintendent as “melting as he leads Lila Mae across the grime-caulked black and white hexagonal tile … bulbous head dissolves into shoulders, then spreads into a broad pool of torso and legs.” And there is an extended kind of stag party thrown for the Department, hosted by “Rick Raymond and the Moon Rays”, which gives Don DeLillo’s Lenny Bruce schtick from Underworld a run for its money.

During this same scene, Whitehead returns to Ellison’s idea that racism denigrates everyone involved by making the “seen” invisible, and the “seer” less than human. The party-goers “do not see” Lila Mae or, for that matter, any of the other “colored help” attending to their increasingly debauched needs. Lila Mae suddenly realizes that:

I highly recommend this book to anyone. Slim, at only 250 pages or so, it’s a quick, exciting, and immersing reading experience. It’s an important book, with the power to permanently change how you look at people (not to mention elevators).

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

So I’ve resolved to complete a “DIY MFA in Creative Writing,” utilizing free (or near-free) resources, including: the local library, local Dallas-Ft. Worth writing critique groups, a small network of alpha and beta readers, selective use of freelance editors, and the web. I’ll be trying to complete the first draft of my novel over the course of two years, taking occasional breaks to finish a collection of short stories (6 or 7 of which are complete).

The reading list for this stay-at-home-dad’s MFA is listed below, and reflects my tastes more than anything else. These are the stories I enjoy reading, and will hopefully influence the novel I eventually produce. I’ve read a few of these already, but most will be new. I’ve also sprinkled in some “just for fun” books such as Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”.

And so here, in no particular order, is my reading list for the next two years. I’ll get started in early June, and will update you infrequently on my progress and thoughts about each novel:

1. Rabbit, Run (John Updike)
2. The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe)
3. Underworld (Don DeLillo)
4. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard)
5. 2666 (Roberto Bolaño)
6. Oryx & Crake (Margaret Atwood)
7. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (David Wroblewski)
8. Jesus’ Son (Denis Johnson)
9. Suttree (Cormac McCarthy)
10. The Brothers K (David James Duncan)
11. Collected Stories (Raymond Carver)
12. American Tabloid (James Ellroy)
13. The Cold Six Thousand (James Ellroy)
14. Matterhorn (Karl Marlantes)
15. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
16. Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry)
17. Drop City (TC Boyle)
18. The Sweet Hereafter (Russell Banks)
19. Middlemarch (George Eliot)
20. Libra (Don DeLillo)
21. Stories (TC Boyle)
22. The Stories of John Cheever (John Cheever)
23. Collected Stories (Amy Hempel)
24. The Sportswriter (Richard Ford)
25. Independence Day (Richard Ford)
26. The Intuitionist (Colson Whitehead)
27. American Pastoral (Philip Roth)
28. Shadow Country (Peter Matthiessen)
29. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
30. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
31. Gilead (Marilynne Robinson)
32. Disgrace (JM Coetzee)
33. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke)
34. Tree of Smoke (Denis Johnson)
35. Chronic City (Jonathan Lethem)
36. The Unconsoled (Kazuo Ishiguro)
37. The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles)
38. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Michael Chabon)
39. The Art of Racing in The Rain (Garth Stein)
40. Await Your Reply (Dan Chaon)
41. Geronimo Rex (Barry Hannah)
42. High Lonesome (Barry Hannah)
43. Best American Short Stories 2005 (edited by Michael Chabon)
44. Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
45. The Things They Carried (Tom O’Brien)
46. Empire Falls (Richard Russo)
47. Escapes (Joy Williams)
48. The Complete Stories (Flannery O’Connor)
49. Too Much Happiness (Alice Munro)
50. Our Story Begins (Tobias Wolff)
51. The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)
52. Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)