Don DeLillo's Novel Underworld

Don DeLillo's massive novel Underworld is a stunning, at times overwhelming, document that limns the details and consequences of the Cold War and American popular culture especially of the middle decades of this century. DeLillo writes in an attempt to compel that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. With that combination of what in other quarters is called the switch from the sublime to the ridiculous, Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb.

When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter - the "shot heard around the world" -and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball - a sort of miniaturized terrestrial sphere - as it passes from hand to hand.

DeLillo then takes us from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lover

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nature acting out realistic situations in believable contemporary settings, and even though the details of his everyday life are vastly different from our own or those of the characters in the novel, we recognize and empathize with the ordinariness of this world. Bruegel's earliest works were landscapes, an interest he retained throughout his life. A number of panoramic landscape drawings show Bruegel's ability, even in his early career, to depict the changing seasonal moods and the atmospheric qualities of nature. Some of Bruegel's drawings were clearly meant to capitalize on the popularity of the bizarre art of Bruegel's famous Flemish predecessor, Bosch. The fantastic, monstrous figures and demonic dwarfs that Bruegel used call up very clearly to mind some of Bosch's imagery. But Bruegel was always more a painter of the peasantry than of anything else, although his paintings are never simple, folk artistic representations of happy peasants gamboling. They have about them - and surely this is one of the things that attracted DeLillo - a sense of the allegorical. His paintings might at one level have been about the details of mundane peasant activities, but they can also just as easily be read as explorations of the beliefs of d

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