![]() ![]() Underworld may or may not be a great novel, but there is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great novelist. ![]() DeLillo himself, however, suddenly fills the sky. Don DeLillo’s exact contemporaries, Robert Stone and Thomas Pynchon, seem poised for a fuller expansion. The novelists are climbing out of the bunker. But now the condition that caused the great discontinuity in American letters has come to an end. They went underground, they sought an underworld of codes and shadows: incognito, incommunicado, and quietly dissident, their literary reputations largely cult-borne. Inasmuch as the mainstream was an institution, these writers could not work within it. The next wave of genius was there, but not visibly, not publicly. Was this an epochal change, a major extinction? No. ![]() Furthermore, it seemed that their numbers were not being replenished by writers of comparable centrality. Among its other virtues, the title of Don DeLillo’s heavily brilliant new book gives a convenient answer to the Big Question about the American novel: Where has the mainstream been hiding? The grand old men, the universal voices of the late-middle century (predominantly the great Jews, and John Updike), are getting older and grander, but the land they preside over looked to be shrinking. ![]()
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