MILLICENT BELL
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permanently infect the future. The book's hero, Nick Shay, is a professional
"waste manager"; representing the author's own experience and con–
sciousness more closely than any other character he seems to express the
artist's own struggle to subdue, understand, and, so, "dispose of" the past.
A vision of the task comes to Nick as he contemplates the Everest of waste
sites at Fresh Kills on Staten Island:
He looked at all that soaring garbage and knew for the first time what
his job was all about. Not engineering or transportation or source
reduction. He dealt in human behavior, people's habits and impulses,
their uncontrollable needs and innocent wishes, maybe their passions,
certainly their excesses and indulgences but their kindness too, their
generosity, and the question was how to keep this mass metabolism
from overwhelming us.
One Jesse Detweiler, who had been a "garbage guerrilla" arrested during
the sixties for snatching Hoover's personal garbage, has, in the nineties,
become an archaeologist and philosopher of waste:
Civilization did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting
scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars,
with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. We
had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn't dis–
card, to reprocess what we couldn't use. Garbage pushed back.
It
mounted and spread. And it forced us to develop the logic and rigor
that would lead to sys tematic inves tigations of reali ty, to science, art,
music, mathematics.
Underworld's
inclusiveness is heroic, encompassing in detail and prolif–
ic narrative invention whole lives-like that of Nick, who resembles the
author as a child of the postwar Bronx streets, or Klara Sax, born in the
same world and later a famous artist who makes constructions out of
worn-out war planes. There are others generated by the same time and
place-Nick's brother Matt, a chess genius who becomes a weapons
research specialist, Sister Edgar, who taught them all in grade school and
now works to aid the inhabitants of the burnt-over neighborhood,
Bronzini, the High School physics teacher, and numerous others. But
scooped into the book's fill also are Brian Glassic, Nick's coworker at
Waste Containment, Nick's wife Marian, and many rnino.r characters with
