Don DeLillo's tome Underworld can be said to be about many things. It is about Nick Shay and his growth from a passionate albeit removed adolescence to a more resigned and domestic adulthood. It is about the Cold War and the ways it affected not only our physical health but our psyche. It is a story about America; about a particular half-century in our history; about a particular web of characters trying to live with and despite America. It is a story about all the things we want to bury and forget, our waste and our past; a story that documents how these things are never truly gone, only waiting to overcome us. It is a story about baseball, or the story of a baseball. It is a story about brothers and sisters and lovers and careers. It is a beautiful book written in intense episodes with strings of sameness running throughout, connecting them in more ways than just the characters that fill them.
I truly enjoyed this book--it had intensity but subtly, as well. Simple language and a pensive, mournful tone dominate the novel, as does a looming sense of danger, and the effect of this on me was a book I could really feel while I read, a book that made it hard not to submerge myself in.
Underworld particularly spoke to me in regards to the Cold War and the development of nuclear weapons. Nick Shay's brother, Matty, is shown to be a young man working in an underground weapons development center for the United States. The effects of radiation fallout are brought up many times. At the end of the novel, Nick witnesses an underground bomb test. In my mind, the Cold War is a period of history that seems very far removed from my own life, though it really only ended right before I was born. Reading about children wearing dog tags to school to make identification easier in case of a nuclear attack, for example, was surprising to me. However, it is not so distant as I believe. And I suppose that is the point of Underworld. Analysts may say that North Korea's current warnings to and threats against the United States are baseless and empty, but I've definitely found it difficult to take them as lightly as the media seems to want us to, and I partly blame Underworld!
One day at school, having left my Kindle on which I was reading Underworld, I needed to buy a book. I chose Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop. I don't know why I chose this book, really, except that I thought it high time I read Dickens! And the cover was great, ha ha. It's a sweet novel, entertaining more than anything. I'm keeping in mind what seems to be a common critique of Dickens while I read, namely that he lacks psychological depth.
My next main read, however, is D. H. Lawrence's Women In Love. I've had this book for a while now, waiting for a proper time to read it. The time has come! I love it. Talk about intensity--Lawrence's novel is a whirlwind, a savage, fiery novel where everyone seems constantly to be at the height of some emotion or other (and I've hardly gotten past page 50!). Violence, erotic passion, hatred, love--these emotions and passions fill the debates of the novel, which are frequent. One chapter looks at knowledge and self-consciousness versus savagery and impulse; another shows characters discussing materialism and the purpose of life. Perhaps the most striking discussion I've read so far in Women in Love is directly connected to Underworld…talk about coincidence!
In Underworld, time runs backwards. From the 90s down to the 50s, the reader sees Nick Shay revert back to the teenager he was when he committed a grave mistake--or a grave crime. Mentioned in the beginning, the particulars of this crime are never revealed until the very end of the novel. (Slight SPOILER ALERT) It turns out that Nick Shay murders an older friend of his, pulling the trigger after the friend denies the gun to be loaded. It is never very clear why Nick fired the shot, whether he he really believed it to be loaded or not. He does seem dazed and shocked that the gun goes off, but he also questions his own motives, making the reader think he did not do it completely by accident, either. In the beginning of Women in Love one of the characters, Gerald Criche, is referred to as Cain, for he killed his brother, although accidentally. It is later revealed that it was through the same manner as Nick Shay's murder--an accidental gun shot. Here is an excerpt that looks at just how accidental something like this could be:
"'Perhaps there was an unconscious will behind it,' said Ursula. 'This playing at killing has some primitive desire for killing in it, don't you think?…No,' said Ursula. 'I couldn't pull the trigger of the emptiest gun in the world, not if someone were looking down the barrel. One instinctively doesn't do it--one can't.'" -52
And yet, Nick did. I loved reading this so soon after finishing Underworld. Though not by design, these two works are connected here.
I've been doing lots of school reading, too. Tom Stoppard's plays have been my favorite: Travesties, Arcadia, Indian Ink, and now we're reading The Invention of Love. I also read Shakespeare's As You Like It, which wasn't unenjoyable. Gulliver's Travels was pretty boring (but not as boring as the 10 page paper I have to write on it!), though.
Anyways, I'm off for now. What are you guys reading?
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