BLASTS FROM THE PAST

DON DELILLO'S BIG NEW NOVEL EXCAVATES THE AMERICAN HALF-CENTURY

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, September 28, 1997

Page: F1

Section: Books

Nobody in America can be as apocalyptically funny as DeLillo, but he has also made ``Underworld'' almost shockingly tender. It opens on the day Bobby Thomson's epochal home run into the stands at the Polo Grounds gave the New York Giants the pennant, the day the West discovered the Soviet Union had detonated an atom bomb. This prologue is a set piece gorgeous in construction, and it moves into position all the elements of tension the novel requires: the pastoral and the profane, the erotic allure of the past and the fear of the future, passion and obsession and the dark helix they occupy together. J. Edgar Hoover and Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason are in the crowd that day; so is a black kid named Cotter Martin, who gets his hands on the ball Thomson knocked into myth. Like DeLillo's Moonie mass wedding at the start of ``Mao II,'' this convergence of global intent and individual emotion conveys the spooky intimacy of legend; it also gives us an idea of the immense design that lies ahead. Or, as the noir narrator of ``Underworld'' announces from the outset, ``Longing on a large scale is what makes history.''

Symbols being worth their weight in uranium, that home-run ball will matter greatly to ``Underworld,'' at least as much as the despotic whims of Hoover or the self-loathing humor of Gleason. (Well, those things figure, too.) Icon of loss and flight, the culmination of dead dreams and diversionary possibility, the ball and its arc through time and space will traverse the South Bronx, Khe Sanh, the eternal distances between father and son. This is no mere bouncing-ball accompaniment to the lyrical ravages of history, though the metaphor itself -- the bucolic yearnings of the national pastime -- is less important than the narrative doors it opens. Central to DeLillo's odyssey is a middle-aged man named Nick Shay, a waste analyst with too much soul and insight into the modern age to sleep well at night. When we meet him, in the summer of 1992, he is 57 and living in Phoenix, driving across the desert to visit the B-52 art installation of Klara Sax, a woman he knew a lifetime ago in New York. Nick has acquired a number of accouterments in the four decades since he last saw Klara, among them a wife, two grown kids, and the now-mythic baseball. He was a Dodgers fan during that autumn of 1951, when the Giants improbably caught and crushed them. That will tell you all you need to know about Nick and the commodity of hope.

In some ways Nick and Klara and their intertwined paths are the least interesting part of ``Underworld,'' but then character development has never been DeLillo's strong card, and it's rarely the point in his fiction. Instead the pair becomes the locus from which the novel opens out like a kaleidoscopic flower, their own decades-old secret a mere personal footnote to the age of covert ops and intrigue in which they've lived. The original specter in Nick Shay's life was a bookie father who disappeared without a trace; Nick's own unredeemable act will be a legacy of that absence, but it's also mirrored in anonymous travesties throughout the novel: a serial highway killer on the loose in Texas, a girl sacrificed to the streets of New York.

From the present-day desert the story emerges backwards, tentatively at first, then in a wild and yet logical choreography. The dots will always connect in DeLillo's world, whether they're pixels or conspiracy theories, and so the people whose stories appear over the years and miles possess a kind of genius association: Klara's first husband, a science teacher who once tutored Nick's younger brother, Matty, in chess; Sister Edgar, a vehement and unforgettable nun who shares not just Hoover's name but a few of his dark compulsions; Lenny Bruce, whose death-howl of need encompasses the era's mostly unexpressed fears. There are also brilliant forays into the neighborhoods of old New York, the clandestine communities built around nuclear research -- the adult Matt Shay works in one of them -- and the insular world of a South Bronx ghetto, where graffiti artists take risks Klara Sax never knew existed. And there are the smells and mysteries and silent assumptions of the Cold War milieu, be they air-raid drills in elementary school or the maybe-apocryphal stories of two-headed fetuses conceived by the downwinders near the bomb blast. All of it is far-flung, some of it is hideous, much of it is funny, and -- no big surprise, in DeLillo country -- it all belongs on the same canvas, linked by conspiracy or politics or video or somebody's sister-in-law or the hair-raising forces of what used to be called evil.

This book is not too long. Some will find it troublingly disjointed; what in fact connects the sprawling frontier of ``Underworld,'' paranoid possibilities aside, is the panoramic and ironic intelligence that invented it. During the epic act of reading the novel, I was reminded, oddly, of Norman Mailer's ``The Executioner's Song'' -- its narrative thrust has a similar velocity. Easily a score of throwaway lines and insights are brilliant enough to make you gasp, and even when DeLillo seems wooden, as he can do when writing about Nick's marriage or Klara's art, he is hardly uninformed. (In an opening flourish of demonic proportion, he has J. Edgar Hoover clutching a Life magazine reproduction of Bruegel's ``The Triumph of Death.'') The title of the novel is picked up in a lost Eisenstein film called ``Unterwelt,'' its New York premiere depicted here with the surrealistic splendor of the Rockettes as backup performers. But ``Underworld'' also refers to the ``underhistory,'' unconscious or untold or inaccessible, that grips and defines us, where plutonium waste is a nihilistic afterthought and where a boy's hopes can disappear and then dictate his life.

With its reptilian fears and its super-evolutionary death technology, ``Underworld'' is in some ways the Terrible American Novel -- its homage more to Joyce than to James, its story captured in a maze of random incident and nuance and metaphoric reckoning. If the narrative seems heartless or distanced at times, it corrects that stance when DeLillo uses his roundhouse right in the final pages, where the anonymous sweep of history takes its toll within the infinite corridors of human loss.

``The power of an event can flow from its unresolvable heart,'' thinks Matt Shaw, ``all the cruel and elusive elements that don't add up, and it makes you do odd things, and tell stories to yourself, and build believable worlds.'' What do we do with our garbage, our broken love affairs or early atrocities, our global toxins and idiocies? Do we bury them, repackage them, market them, make them art? If history is its own most trustworthy witness, we can never elude the poisons of the past, nor pretend to outlive their indelible grip. Here DeLillo has costumed them all in a nuclear shroud at a masked ball, and the result is something huge and somber.