- guardian.co.uk, Saturday 10 January 1998 11.08 GMT
The presence of pre-millennial tension is harder to dispute. What the book says is that the Cold War may be over, having occupied half of our century, but its legacy is inescapable and unresolved, and plenty of loose ends are still dangling. 'I certainly agree with you about loose ends. We're in between two historical periods, the Cold War and whatever it is that follows it. I'm not sure that this is what follows it. This may just be the interim. I think we're just beginning to wonder what happened, and what didn't happen.'
But the big difference between the before and the after is the bomb, and the rest of the science created by quantum theory, which can no more be uninvented than the poisoned waste it creates can be buried and forgotten. 'During the Cold War we talked about our weapons, and we thought about them, and we devised noble names for them out of Greek and Roman myth. But we didn't think about the waste that the weapons would produce. Towards the end of the novel, a Russian character devises a theology of weapons and waste - if our weapons were godly, it's our waste that's demonic, and it begins to occupy the literal underworld of the planet, because burying it is all we can do.
'That's where I had the first inkling that the title of the book ought to be Underworld, when, fairly early, I was writing a sentence about plutonium in connection with Nick's work. Plutonium, which comes from Pluto, god of the dead and ruler of the underworld. After that there seemed to be all sorts of underworld references appearing.'
There is nothing comfortable about DeLillo's message, and he knows it. But he is not happy to be informed, in the course of an otherwise favourable review of Underworld in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, that he is thought of as America's 'coldest and most pitiless novelist'. 'I reject that,' he said. 'I don't know what else to say. I've written a series of three or four books, starting with White Noise, of which people keep saying, progressively, that here's a writer who's becoming more human. But the other critical complaint, that I don't like my characters, whatever that means, does occasionally resurface. If somebody said that Mao II was a pitiless book, I would disagree, but I would tend to understand why it was being said. But I don't see how it could be said about this book, or about my work in general. There are certain remarks one sees that are so far from what the writer thinks is the approximate truth that it's very hard to know how to respond. So I don't.'
Perhaps the criticism is prompted by his apparent lack of the need, so common among novelists, to people his books with admirable versions of himself. 'Well, yes. Or I don't dote on my characters, which I take to be a 19th-century pastime that's survived in a rather robust form. But I don't know how work that contains so much evident love of language can be called pitiless, more or less regardless of what happens to the characters. I mean, you can read Cormac McCarthy and find pitilessness, as in Blood Meridian, but isn't it redeemed by language, balanced by language?'
It certainly seems less than fair on a man capable of creating the two paragraphs with which Nick Shay is introduced. Forming an interior monologue on cars and deserts, they are to be found at the very beginning of Part 1. Here's a time-saving tip: if they do the trick, you can be pretty sure the remaining 826-and-a-half pages of this majestic work will be worth the detour.
'He speaks in your voice, American . . .' Striped by sunshine and shadow, the audience in the Union Square bookstore listened attentively for 45 minutes as DeLillo's hard, grey voice wandered through episodes from the linked destinies of Nick Shay and Klara Sax. At the end he was rewarded with half a minute of solid applause. But he is not, and will never be, a performer.
It may be that he is destined to be one of those authors whose work is admired more than it is loved. And it may even be that he prefers it this way.
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