MILLICENT BELL
Fiction Chronicle
UNDERWORLD.
By
Don DeLillo. Scribner. $27.50
TOWARD THE END OF TIME.
By
John Updike. Knopf. $25.00
THE
WITCH
OF EXMOOR.
By
Margaret Drabble. Harcourt Brace. $23.00
THE HOUSE GUN.
By
Nadine Gordimer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $24.00
As
Roland Barthes pointed out, the hallmark of realism is the irrelevant
detail-the description, the character, the incident that is there simply
because we can believe in it. But it is also true that novelists are driven by
paranoid obsession, compelled to find linking meanings and patterns of sig–
nificance, to connect, connect. In
Ulysses,
Joyce's novel to end all realist
novels, a profuse mundane contingency is strapped and laced into formal
connectedness by arbitrary recurrences and schemes of reference-a
holism in which he could not have seriously believed. What else but a
mockery of continuity and relation is the piece of soap which travels from
one to another episode during Bloomsday, appearing and reappearing like
a mystic sign? In Don DeLillo's
Underworld,
the traveling object is a base–
ball. Struck into the bleachers for a three-run homer in the ninth inning,
it copped the pennant for the New York Giants playing the Brooklyn
Dodgers on October 3, 1951. The ball, a commemorative object, a precious
souvenir, a supreme collectable, journeys on its way like the overcoat in
Gogol's famous story. Through a span of fifty years in this vast multiplex
novel about America the ball is passed from one disconnected DeLillo
character to another. Russ Hodges, the radio announcer, thinks of the spot
where the ball disappeared into the crowd in the stands as something like
Appomatox, "another kind of history... they will carry something out of
here that joins them all in a rare way, that binds them to a memory with
protective power."
The accident of simultaneity links events just as arbitrarily, the novel–
ist seems to believe. The front page of the
New York Times
gave equal
three-column headlines to Bobby Thomson's whammo at the Polo
Grounds and the first news of the Soviet atom bomb test, the beginning of
the cold war. DeLillo, looking into his microfilm viewer, was fascinated: "A
pair of mated headlines....What did I see in this juxtaposition? Two kinds
of conflict, certainly, but something else, maybe many things-I could not
have said at the time." In the novel he imagines that
J.
Edgar Hoover, actu-
