In Episode 42, DDSWTNP’s Summer of Underworld comes to a conclusion with guest Jesse Kavadlo, who draws on his New York and Fordham University past and his many years of DeLillo scholarship to discuss Part 6 and the Epilogue with us. This episode digs into connections between this mafia-associated novel and The Sopranos, the deeper meanings of Nick’s shooting of George Manza, and the questions of belief, miracles, and art raised by the reactions to the Angel Esmeralda in the Epilogue. Together with Jesse we share thoughts about Albert Bronzini’s distillation of DeLillo’s themes, the presence of other violence in the basement room where Nick raises that sawed-off shotgun, and how his final confrontation with Brian Glassic in Kazakhstan rounds out his history. Doubling, oedipal anger, and elements of circularity and balance in the narrative occupy our attention, as do the enduring meanings in DeLillo of sacrificial victims, gunshots and gun violence, and the possibilities of redemption and aestheticism in images of recycling. We suggest throughout the bottomless associations of so many images in this novel and the way regionalism and highly local cultures ramify with the national and epic scopes DeLillo is interested in. Jesse gives not just great analysis but great voice and performance to some passages we close-read together (including the book’s amazing Joycean ending), and we cover a few ideas about the ways Underworld relates to contemporary popular cultures of cinema, television, and digital forms.

As DeLillo’s big novel passes age 29 we offer the last of six total episodes in this series, and at the very end we reflect briefly on the Summer of Underworld and express our gratitude to Jesse Kavadlo and our other guests in this endeavor: John Duvall, Curt Gardner, Patrick Whitmarsh, and Mark Osteen. As we say in the coda too, we'd love to hear from you -- send us your feedback on any or all of our episodes, whether on Instagram messages or ddswtnp@gmail.com.

For a profile of Jesse Kavadlo’s writing, see: https://jessekavadlo.com/

Texts cited and discussed in this episode:

John Duvall, Don DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD. Continuum Contemporaries Reader’s Guide. 2002.

Graley Herren, The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo. Bloomsbury, 2019.

Jesse Kavadlo, Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief. Peter Lang, 2004.

—, “Recycling Authority: Don DeLillo’s Waste Management.” Critique 42.4 (Summer 2001): 384-401.

Walter Kendrick, “Fiction in Review: Journeying Through Underworld.” The Yale Review 86.2 (April 1998).

In Episode 41 DDSWTNP continue the Summer of Underworld by turning attention to Part 5 and the conclusion of Manx Martin’s narrative and welcoming to the show Mark Osteen, major literary scholar, author of American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture (2000), and editor of the two Library of America volumes comprising DeLillo’s novels from 1982 to 1997. Mark is also an accomplished saxophonist with special insights into the inspiration DeLillo takes from jazz. We hear from Mark about all his absolutely essential work with DeLillo and Underworld since the 1990s, including his criticism on the novel, his suggestion to DeLillo about publishing his works with Library of America, and his conversations with the author about his writing techniques, from his lack of preparatory outlines to his interesting reply when asked whether he lifted any lines from Lenny Bruce recordings. In our discussion Mark moves nimbly across the many fragments of “Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry,” showing how methods of montage and improvisation account for many of DeLillo’s structural choices, as well as how motifs of Cold War containment, chemicals’ ubiquity, the religion of consumerism, and the hidden connections of everyday life suffuse Part 5 in particular. Points of focus include the incredibly rich Bruce monologues, particularly his consideration of the art of making things up as DeLillo’s metafictional reflection; how DeLillo brings Hoover back into the narrative through the Black and White Ball and its “garbage guerrillas”; and how Part 5 fills in some unknown aspects of Nick Shay’s education, Jesuitical, sexual, and otherwise. We conclude with some close attention to Manx’s sale of the ball over a shared whiskey flask to Charles Wainwright, suggesting the ways this scene resonates with other black/white relationships across the novel. Over these two hours Mark draws on moments from his recent teaching of the novel to undergrads, makes comparisons to a few other contemporary writers, and shares with us and our listeners many ideas from the decades he’s spent at the forefront of DeLillo scholarship.

For more on Mark Osteen’s work and the Library of America edition he edited that includes Underworld, see: https://www.loyola.edu/academics/english/faculty/osteen-mark.html, https://markosteen.com/, and https://www.loa.org/books/783-mao-ii-underworld/

In Episode 40 DDSWTNP cover Parts 3 and 4 and Manx Martin (2) of Underworld and welcome to the show Patrick Whitmarsh, a scholar of eco-criticism, the anthropocene, and the contemporary U.S. novel. We spend time discussing the importance of Underworld to Patrick’s arguments about perspective, scale, images of the earth, and the advent of what he calls the “vertical sciences,” taking in geological discoveries, aerial viewpoints, and all the new understandings of natural and built environments that DeLillo’s novel juxtaposes. Topics and images that preoccupy us in this discussion include DeLillo’s reasons for placing side by side the views of “garbage archeologist” Jesse Detwiler, Nick’s religious self-examination, and a convention for swingers; Klara Sax’s “rooftop summer,” film-viewing, and all the honing of her artistic perspective that takes place across these 1970s sections; and the many comparisons of filmmaking and other artforms that dominate Part 4: “Cocksucker Blues,” especially Sergei Eisenstein’s science fiction and montage techniques and Ismael Muñoz’s developing graffiti work. Does DeLillo arrange Underworld according to Eisenstein’s techniques, and does this idea help mediate questions about modernism and postmodernism? What power is expressed when Moonman claims about his painted subway train, “I’m your movie, motherfucker”? What themes of ecology and lost innocence emerge in considering Klara’s views of “the West” and the Zapruder film? How do such scenes connect to the aerial photography important to Matt Shay’s surreally treated military work in “the Pocket”? What layers of paranoia cut across Manx’s quest to sell the baseball? And who can lay claim to the legacy of Charlie Parker? The discussion draws in not just Underworld but parts of DeLillo’s earlier corpus, especially ideas of “counter-archeology” from Great Jones Street. Patrick adds as well some perspectives from other U.S. fiction of the late 1990s, and all together you have another two and a half hours of insight into DeLillo and especially what his waste-centered work has to teach us about the earth and ecology.

For a scholarly profile of Patrick Whitmarsh, see https://www.holycross.edu/academics/people/patrick-whitmarsh

Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:

Patrick Whitmarsh, Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science (Stanford, 2023); Chapter 1, “Earthly Language: Don DeLillo and the Novel of the Anthropocene.”

Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (U. of Minnesota, 2016).

Richard Williams, “Everything Under the Bomb” (interview with Don DeLillo), The Guardian, Jan. 10, 1998. https://www.theguardian.com/books/1998/jan/10/fiction.dondelillo (“When people say White Noise is post-modern, I don't really complain. I don’t say it myself. But I don’t see Underworld as post-modern. Maybe it’s the last modernist gasp. I don't know.”)

Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (Coffee House Press, 1997).