HOW DID WE GET HERE?

By Paul Gray

Don DeLillo's 10th novel, Mao II, features a famously reclusive author named Bill Gray who finally goes public, with unhappy consequences. Now DeLillo, not a recluse but visibly wary in the presence of cameras and interviewers, stands braced to face a lot of both during a seven-city tour to promote his new novel, Underworld (Scribner; 827 pages; $27.50). "My publisher has worked very hard on this book," he says, explaining his willingness to go on the road. "I do feel I'm entering some self-replicating white space, where the distinction between working and living has been erased." Reminded of what happened--of what he made happen--to Bill Gray, DeLillo laughs, a bit uneasily.

The imminence of Underworld has been talked and written about for months. By now nearly everyone who cares about contemporary literary fiction has heard how DeLillo got the inspiration for the novel. Intrigued by the hubbub back in 1991 surrounding the 40th anniversary of Ralph Branca's fateful pitch and Bobby Thomson's subsequent home run--the so-called shot heard 'round the world that gave the New York Giants a playoff victory over the Brooklyn Dodgers and the National League championship--DeLillo went to the library and looked up on microfilm the front page of the New York Times for Oct. 4, 1951, the day after the game. He discovered something that produced what he now calls "a hush in my mind": the Giants' triumph headlined three columns wide on the left and a headline in an identical format on the right announcing a Soviet nuclear test. "Different kinds of conflict," DeLillo remembers musing, "two shots heard 'round the world."

The long story he wrote in response to this epiphany, which appeared as Pafko at the Wall in the October 1992 issue of Harper's, forms the prologue for Underworld. It is a tour de force, an astonishing set piece that captures the sweep and emotions of those tumultuous few hours in the Polo Grounds as experienced by, among many others, the radio announcer Russ Hodges ("The Giants win the pennant!"), attendant celebrities Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor and J. Edgar Hoover (yes, DeLillo learned later, they were really present), and a fictional black kid named Cotter Martin, who jumps the turnstiles to get in at the beginning and makes off, at the end of the game, with Thomson's home-run ball.

That bashed artifact bounces repeatedly in the rest of Underworld, eventually coming to rest in the possession of Nick Shay, an executive with a waste-management firm in Phoenix, Ariz., who pays $34,500 to a New Jersey memorabilia dealer named Marvin Lundy for the Thomson souvenir. Why buy something that even the seller cannot authoritatively trace back to Bobby Thomson's bat? (DeLillo's readers know about Cotter Martin and can make the connection, but his characters can't.) Why, especially, since Nick was a teenager in the Bronx and a desperate Dodgers fan when the home run was hit? "It's not about Thomson hitting the homer," an embarrassed Nick explains to some colleagues who have learned of his possession. "It's about Branca making the pitch. It's all about losing."

Nick's infatuation with the idea of loss is one of the myriad subjects offered by Underworld; insofar as the novel has a hero, Nick is the man. But plot synopsis, always a suspect enterprise when applied to first-class fiction--Ulysses, an ad salesman's day in Dublin--fails utterly to convey what DeLillo is up to in this book. For example, it is faithful to the imagined facts of the matter to report that Nick "eventually" buys the Thomson baseball but a misrepresentation of the novel's unfolding veer and flow. On the pages, Nick's purchase occurs relatively early, not so very long after the stunning prologue. Because after Thomson's blast, the bulk of Underworld jumps forward and then runs in reverse from the early 1990s to the day after the game. DeLillo is offering nothing less than a countdown (ten, nine, eight...) of a merciful fizzle, of the cold war from its demise, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, back to that moment of infectious innocent exuberance under an unseen mushroom cloud on a fall afternoon in the Polo Grounds. The subject of Underworld is how we got from there to here and what happened to us along the way.

This premise, or promise, is audacious and preposterous. And DeLillo delivers the real goods. Several conventional novels, unconventionally told, run through Underworld. There is Nick's story and that of his younger brother Matt, plus an account of Klara Sax, a Bronx housewife in 1951 who later becomes a famous artist. DeLillo surrounds these people with a host of other characters vociferously trying to make sense out of the times of their lives. Some--many, come to think of it--seem crazy, like the collector Marv Lundy, who believes that the birthmark on Mikhail Gorbachev's head is really the shape of Latvia and foretells the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But what is crazy, Underworld insistently inquires, given the context of the past five decades, when people learned how to blow up the world and then, unaccountably, did not, at least not so far? "Everything's connected"--the mantra of both paranoiacs and artists--runs throughout Underworld. Nearly everyone in the novel says or thinks it, including J. Edgar Hoover, who reappears as a guest, this time only fictionally, at the Black & White Ball that Truman Capote threw at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan on Nov. 29, 1966. "It's all linked," Hoover tells his second in command, about the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. "The war protesters, the garbage thieves, the rock bands, the promiscuity, the drugs, the hair."

They are all in UNDERWORLD, and much more besides. A short history of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 as traced through DeLillo's imagined creations of Lenny Bruce's night-club monologues. Repeated motifs, as in classical music or jazz: photographs of Thomson and Branca posing with pretty much all the American Presidents since Eisenhower. The same people, places and things keep turning up: Jayne Mansfield, Greenland, orange juice, the eerie recurrence of the number 13. (Ralph Branca wore it on his uniform. Uranium 238 is the crucial element in an atom bomb; add up those numbers and see what you get.) Amazingly, everything in Underworld does connect. Is this novel a vindication of paranoia or a critique of the human hunger for patterns?

DeLillo answers carefully, "I wanted to write a book that would locate itself at the interface of the real world and the searches that people and institutions launch to understand it." He admits that the writer, during the age he chronicles, has become "a marginal figure," reduced to "observing from the edge." Underworld should thrust DeLillo, whether he likes it or not, into the hot center.