Shades of Gray Chipping Away at a Very Good but Very Long Book: Underworld

It took me more than two weeks, but finally, I slew the beast.

Which is not to say that it dragged or anything. On the contrary, Underworld only rarely slips below "gripping" as it tells parts of the stories of I can't tell how many different characters over the course of forty years, from October 3rd, 1951, to some time in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union's breakup.

Actually, that's completely backwards. Or rather, it's accurate, but completely misleading. Underworld does begin in 1951 and end at some indeterminate point in the early to mid-90s. But it's not narrated that way, and while the unconventional narrative style takes some getting used to, it ultimately is successful in giving a fuller account of how the characters came to be the people they are by the end of...the plot, I suppose. Which is not the same thing as the end of the book.

At this point, some readers of this blog will be appalled to discover that baseball plays a significant role in the plot of Underworld. Oh no, I hear them moan, he can talk about baseball even in book reviews. When will it end? The answer to which is never. But while I certainly didn't pick up Underworld for the baseball stories, I did think of more significant things about the baseball than about the strands of the interwoven plot dealing with The Bomb, art, J. Edgar Hoover's private life, waste disposal or any of the other many fascinating tangents.

Michael Berube has an essay excerpt up at his website in which he discusses differences in how Delillo deals with narrative and motive in Underworld and White Noise, which I haven't read. I'm clearly not going to tangle with a literature professor on literary theory, a subject I know nothing about, in an essay that is about at least one work I haven't read. Especially since it would be more shadowboxing than actual tangling.

I do think, however, that the seeming absurdity of comparing a baseball playoff game to the Cold War is slightly less absurd that Berube implies. "This, finally, is the real distinction between sports and the rest of our lives: though sports may present complex questions about justice that are also complex questions about narrative, sports offer their fans a form of narrative that is evacuated of motive," he writes. I don't know that sports are evacuated of motive, at least not in a way particularly distinct from any other human activity except making a living. And, of course, the professional athletes in Underworld are doing just that: making a living.

"No one asks Michael Jordan, “why were you trying to hit that buzzer-beater?” No one grills Tom Brady about why he was trying to unload the ball against the Raiders, no one wonders why the New York Giants were trying to beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, regardless of whether they were stealing signs. It is for contest, that’s all," Berube continues. Well, sure. But the questions no one asks do have answers. The Giants wanted to win the pennant. And they wanted to win the pennant because they wanted to be the best at baseball. Well, why did they choose baseball? I don't know the answers, but they do exist. Athletes want to win because that's the point of the competition, but they all have different and individual motives for competing in the first place.

So I'd argue that sports in general is less devoid of motive than Berube believes. What about the other side of this particular coin, that of the Cold War? Earlier in his essay, Berube quotes Viktor Maltsev, a minor character in the book, as saying that the Cold War was fought "For contest. You won, we lost." Berube then says that this construction reduces "the Cold War to a “contest” without any motive other than to produce a winner and a loser," noting that there's "Nothing here about democracy or the worker’s paradise, nothing about market and command economies, nothing about NATO and the Warsaw Pact, Czechoslovakia or Chile, Pershings or SS-18s, capitalist lackeys or evil empires."

Again, I don't really see what's incompatible between any of these things and viewing the Cold War as a "contest." My point here is not to trivialize the stakes of this "contest," as I'm not actually foolish enough to believe that the World Series is remotely as important as nuclear-armed games of global domination. But in terms of motive, which after all is what Berube is discussing, I don't really see how any of the things Berube mentions establish higher motives than the one that motivated both Ralph Branca and Bobby Thompson-to be the top dog.

"Pershings and SS-18s" are the bats and balls this particular contest was played with, Czechoslovakia, Chile, Vietnam and Hungary its stadiums. "Capitalist lackeys or evil empires" are pretty clearly the geopolitical equivalents of trash talk, and NATO and the Warsaw Pact are the names across the front of the jerseys.

And so we come to the crux: "democracy and the worker's paradise." I don't dispute that there were true believers in both on their respective sides. But was that why the Cold War happened? I can't see it. I can't believe, for the life of me, that the Politburo was motivated by a belief in the World Revolution. I don't like to pretend to be able to read the minds of men long dead, but it's my sincere belief that what motivated the men in the Kremlin from October 3, 1951 on was a desire for raw power, pure and simple. Similarly, given the American record of supporting any authoritarian son-of-a-bitch they could rely on to be anti-Communist, I can't believe that the men in the White House were playing for anything more noble than victory for its own sake-not that I think as Dangerous a Professor as Dr. Berube takes the "freedom and apple pie" stuff at face value either.

"One side goes on, to spin its narrative another day, and one side goes home," concludes this particular section of Berube's essay, and it seems to me that this is a very accurate summary of what happens in all of the contests Delillo describes, from the Cold War to FBI interoffice and cryptosexual politics to chess to the art world to the crimes of the Texas Highway Killer to, of course, the third game of the 1951 National League playoff. All of the participants in these contests have motives of some sort, and at the same time all of these contests can be boiled down to the familiar postseason cliche: "Win or go home."

Anyway, quibbling done (for now), Underwold is a truly amazing book that you should all read. The prologue alone, which deals with the aforementioned third game of the Giants-Dodgers series, is worth the proverbial price of admission (don't jump the gate!) for the way it captures everything I think of when I think about America at the height of its power. Plus it's about baseball. What else could you want?