DATE: Sunday, September 28, 1997            TAG: 9709180486

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY ANN EGERTON 

                                            LENGTH:   77 lines

ANOTHER SHOT AT HISTORY

UNDERWORLD

DON DeLILLO

Scribner. 827 pp. $27.50.

One might guess that a book that opens with Jackie Gleason vomiting on Frank Sinatra's shoe moments after Bobby Thomson's winning three-run homer in the 1951 Dodgers-Giants playoff game would be quirky and dark. Indeed, moments after the home run, a message to FBI head J. Edgar Hoover that the Soviet Union has set off an atomic bomb serves notice that, thrilling baseball games notwithstanding, the world has changed forever.

The title Underworld indicates Don DeLillo's view of America in the second half of this century. In this, his 11th novel, he describes, through a mix of real historical events and the actions of a carefully constructed cast of characters - Catholic, Protestant and Jewish; white and black - a downward spiral of individual hopes and behavior that propels the sad, ominous decline of our nation. Underworld is one of a growing genre of late century fictional works by writers such as Tom Wolfe (Bonfire of the Vanities), Philip Roth (American Pastoral) and George Garret (The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You) to explore what has gone so terribly wrong in our society.

Nick Shay, who killed a man in a mindless, casual shooting when he was 17 and whose career (after time in correction) is in waste management, passes for the hero of Underworld. His brother Matty is in weapons. Nick's real surname is Constanza, but since the brothers' father went out for a pack of cigarettes when they were small, never to return, he, Matty and his mother have used her maiden name.

Shifting ownership of Thomson's home-run ball - ``The Shot Heard Round the World'' - is traced throughout the novel, but garbage is the recurring symbol of Underworld, and degradation reigns. Nick calls landfills ``the scenery of the future.'' To his colleague, Brian Glassic, Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, N.Y., is ``how the waste stream ended, where all the appetites and hankerings, the sodden second thoughts came running out, the things you wanted ardently and then did not.''

In keeping with the downward slide of the tale, Brian has an affair with Nick's wife, Marian, who tries to introduce him to heroin. Nick, who at 17 had an affair with a neighbor's wife, later, during a business trip, has an afternoon stand with a woman who was at a spouse-swapping meeting. J. Edgar Hoover and companion Clyde Toulson are stealthy and pathetic in their self-gratification. In voices that are oddly resigned, jaunty and hip, DeLillo's characters show that the moral rules that once governed us have dissipated. A kaleidoscope of ruin colors our cities as crime and drugs take over and law-abiding citizens cower in fear.

In case we miss the point, comedian Lenny Bruce, who died of a drug overdose in 1966, acts as a chorus in disjointed sections of the book, ranting about national leaders, the Cuban Missile Crisis and his perceptions of Americans, and shouting, ``We're all going to die, dig?''

In an age in which sound bites seem to be all the populace can manage in a political campaign, one wonders how many readers are up to plowing through 827 pages of fiction that cover 45 years and involve numerous, often unnecessary characters. Underworld is too long; its power is diffused by its girth. The storytelling, in out-of-sequence time frames, is sometimes confusing.

That said, Don DeLillo, winner of the National Book Award, the Pen/ Faulkner Award and the Aer Lingus/Irish Times Prize, is a dazzling writer who passes nimbly from drive-by shootings to stalwart nuns to the Rockettes to the film of JFK's assassination. He surprises, too, introducing an element of spirituality that may dilute the book's cynicism and terror but is hard to swallow. DeLillo seems to be saying that the country is a mess but that religious faith and human spirit can renew our strength.

Finally, Nick, our ex-con narrator, becomes a contented grandfather in Phoenix, but he longs for his days of disarray, ``when I was a danger to others and a mystery to myself.'' We are indeed a perverse and contrary species. MEMO: Ann Egerton is a free-lance writer who lives in Baltimore. ILLUSTRATION: ARCHIVE PHOTOS

Bobby Thomson's game-winning home run in 1951 is the starting point

of Don DeLillo's mammoth fictional study of America in decline.

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