Carl’s Reviews > Underworld > Status Update

The title has suddenly shown up three times: in German in the Eisenstein film title (which seems to be apocryphal), in the brief allusion to the 1927 gangster film (which is IMDB-confirmed as real), and in a p.466 reference that seems casual but of course is not.

A curious style for dialogue, especially for a book so attentive to the idea of Connection: conversations in which the interlocutors don’t quite seem to be responding to each other or answering each other’s questions.

Was DeLillo influenced by Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49? W.A.S.T.E. becomes literal waste, and the mysterious search for a potentially unknowable proof remains, along with the cast of interlinked characters. The humor has dissipated—the 90s are not the 60s, after all—and the adultery has a darker tone, plus it’s wrapped in philosophy. Everything kind of is. Pynchon might roll his eyes.

The thinking and linking here create deep impressions, but the avoidance of action is getting on my nerves. The prioritization of internal thought (complemented by the attention to language) becomes an affectation. Often fascinating, often even compelling, but still affected.

Hyperlinks: I wonder if DeLillo styled this 1996 novel on the then-relatively new (first visual web browser was 1994, right?) idea of hyperlinking. Each character kicks off a new one, kind of a book version of the proverbial internet rabbit-hole.

More Coover-ian stuff: the wild cataloguing of flying objects—an urban litany, Whitman but sped up into the 20th century—blitzed out in polysyndetons and asyndetons and juxtaposition. Even the sexual images (Coover’s would have been humans, not a Brueghel painting) and the news. Such an astonishing capturing of intensity, of “a memory with protective power” (58).

Hugely evocative and energetic, making me think of Coover: the references to the Dodgers’ and Giants’ origins (Superbas and Bridegrooms) carries a flag reminiscent of the wildly underappreciated The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., while the congregation of world events in the opening chapter smacks of the Uncle Sam chapters of the similarly under-recognized The Public Burning.