"Gobsmacked" by Don DeLillo

Once in a while you read a novel and, if you are real lucky, the author puts a paragraph in somewhere that makes you see or understand an integral part of modern living. You read it and feel "gobsmacked" (i.e., shocked). It's the recognition that you get when something you knew but hadn't quite articulated is staring back at you on the printed page. It's rare and wonderful for me to come across this phenomenon. Maybe I need to read more serious stuff.

It happened to me when recently when I was getting into Don DeLillo's magnum opus, Underworld. I had read his previous novel Libra, a fact-based novel about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and the forces in and outside of the young man that put him in the Texas School Book Depository on that faithful November day in Dallas when the USA lost a young and charismatic President. I came away from that book impressed with how well DeLillo had transcended the typical "JFK Conspiracy" sub-genre to make a singular psychological study of a disturbed young man. It reads like an American version of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground. The former inspired me to reread the latter.

The subjects of Underworld (1997) are a group of characters living in America during a period roughly forty years worth of what we now call "The Cold War Era". DeLillo starts the story with a dynamic fifty pages of so of another Great American Event: the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" in October, 1951, when New York Giant Bobby Thompson hit a walk-off home off run to beat pitcher Ralph Branca and the Brooklyn Dodgers in a decisive playoff game. The thread through the novel is the search for that souvenir ball--which has somehow eluded positive identification --but the story takes off in several directions covering modern American life: serial killers, the waste collection industry, post-modern Christo-style art exhibits, space "burials" of human remains, the poverty of inner cities like the South Bronx , and the fear of The Bomb.

Since I am only halfway through the book, and will save a little overview for later, I simply want to include this passage. You be the judge if it's "gobsmack" worthy. The voice of the story is a middle-aged native New Yorker, with a shady upbringing, named Nick Shay. He's a man who wants to find the Bobby Thompson baseball. His profession is waste management and he is speaking about modern organizations:

The corporation is supposed to take us outside ourselves. We design these organized bodies to respond to the market, face foursquare into the world. But things tend to drift dimly inward. Gossip, rumor, promotions, personalities...all the human lapses that take up space in the company soul. But the world persists, the world heals in a way. You feel the contact points around you, the caress of linked grids that give you a sense of order and command. It's there in the warbling banks of phones, in the fax machines and photocopiers and all the oceanic logic stored in your computer. Bemoan technology all you want. It expands your self-esteem and connects you in your well-pressed suit to the things that slip through the world other wise unperceived.

There's more where that came from, but that's a good start I think.

Pictured above, the author

http://www.k-state.edu/english/nelp/delillo/links.html