The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Don DeLillo · a novel in a prologue, six parts and an epilogue · Scribner, 1997 · scored on DeLillo’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Historical novel of the Cold War as elegy; family and neighbourhood novel, systems novel, novel of the nation and religious fiction in one book
Mythos
The underworld as waste, the Mob, the underground test, the subway and the unconscious of a culture; a descent through layers to a basement; a relic passed from hand to hand; a miracle at a billboard; Bruegel’s Triumph of Death as emblem
Phase
The afternoon of 3 October 1951 at the Polo Grounds; then backward from the spring and summer of 1992 through 1978 and 1974 to the fall of 1951 and the summer of 1952, with interludes on the night of the game and an epilogue in the 1990s
Presentation
Fiction; a prologue, six titled parts in reverse order of time, three interludes headed for Manx Martin that run forward, and an epilogue; the prologue in the present tense among many minds, and Nick Shay’s narration among the chapters given to others
Register
From the play-by-play cadence of the prologue to the deadpan dialogue, the aphorism and the litany, Lenny Bruce’s stand-up, the lyric warmth of the Bronx and the documents of a network
Scale
A Bronx family across forty years, a city, and a country’s weapons and waste, with their reach to the Kazakh steppe
Governing Proposition
On the October afternoon in 1951 when Bobby Thomson’s home run beats the Dodgers at the Polo Grounds, J. Edgar Hoover in his box is told of a Soviet atomic test, and the ball goes into the crowd; forty years later Nick Shay, a Bronx boy who shot a man and became an executive in waste management, owns what may be that ball, and the novel goes down backward through his life and his country to the basement where the gun was fired. The wager of the novel is that the Cold War was a structure of American inner life, binding the bomb to the consumer economy and what a society makes to what it throws away, and that a history told backward, through an object, a man and his waste, can show what its end left behind.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” The first sentence of the book addresses its reader as an American and sets beside him a boy, Cotter Martin, at the Polo Grounds in New York on 3 October 1951, the afternoon the Giants beat the Dodgers on Bobby Thomson’s home run. The prologue is told in the present tense, and it moves among many minds: Cotter in the stands; the broadcaster Russ Hodges at his microphone; J. Edgar Hoover in a box with Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor; and the crowd, tens of thousands of people made one body by the game. Its cadence is the cadence of a long play-by-play.
In his box Hoover is told of a Soviet atomic test. The news reaches him in the middle of the game, and the book sets the two events on one afternoon, the home run and the bomb. From the upper deck the crowd sends down pages torn from a magazine, and they fall over the stands. Among them is a reproduction of Bruegel’s painting The Triumph of Death, and it settles on Hoover: a picture of death’s army comes to rest on the director of the bureau while the news of the bomb is in his ear.
Thomson’s home run ends the game, and the ball goes into the stands. Cotter Martin takes it home. The prologue ends in a diminuendo, the noise of the afternoon falling away. It had been published on its own five years before the novel, as “Pafko at the Wall” in Harper’s, and it can be read alone. In the novel it is a beginning in two senses: the ball will pass from hand to hand for forty years, and the book, leaping to the end of those years, will dig its way back down to this autumn.
Movement II
The first part leaps to the spring and summer of 1992. Nick Shay, born in the Bronx, is an executive in waste management, living in Phoenix, and he buries the culture’s refuse for a living. His narration is level and guarded, the voice of a man who has made himself out of systems. There is a marriage, and an affair, and the book gives both at length. Under the level voice is a fact he does not dwell on: as a boy in the Bronx he lost his father, who went out for cigarettes and did not return.
Nick has bought a baseball. It is, or is said to be, the ball Thomson hit into the stands in 1951, and its line of owners has been traced from hand to hand by a collector, Marvin Lundy. Whether the ball Nick owns is the true ball, the book never settles. It is a relic in the old sense, a sacred object whose worth lies in what it has touched, and its line of owners runs through the book as its spine.
Around Nick stand the others. His brother Matt is a weapons analyst in the desert, modelling annihilation while Nick buries waste. Klara Sax, an artist, is painting decommissioned B-52 bombers in the desert. Then the book begins its descent. “Elegy for Left Hand Alone” and the parts after it go down through the years: to the spring of 1978 in “The Cloud of Unknowing”, to the summer of 1974 in “Cocksucker Blues”, through “Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry”, and at last to the fall of 1951 and the summer of 1952 in “Arrangement in Gray and Black”. Each layer lies on the one below it, and the reader goes down through them knowing already what the people in them will become.
Movement III
Waste is the book’s matter. Nick and his colleagues treat it as a discipline, and one of them is a theorist of garbage: in their talk the book’s idea is spoken outright, that what a society makes and what it throws away are one system. The Fresh Kills landfill is seen whole, a terraced mass of a city’s refuse risen into a hill. The waste of the culture, buried, sorted and theorised, is the underworld in its plainest sense.
The bomb is the other half of the system. Matt models it; the bombers that carried it come home to be painted as art in the desert under Klara’s hand. In 1962, during the missile crisis, Lenny Bruce works through a run of stand-up sets, and the dread of those days enters the act until the comedy becomes a cry of fear. What a society builds to destroy and what it discards after use are kept in the same book, and the book keeps finding that they are the same thing.
And there is the sacred. Nick was schooled by Jesuits; Sister Edgar, a nun in the Bronx, lives in fear and in faith. The cloud of unknowing, which names the third part, stands as the book’s emblem for what cannot be known: what took Nick’s father, whether the ball is the ball, what the bomb has made of the people who live under it. The book does not answer these questions. It goes down beneath them.
Movement IV
The last part is the Bronx in the fall of 1951 and the summer of 1952, and the voice warms. The deadpan of the earlier parts gives way to a lyric register: the streets, the families, the neighbourhood where the Shay boys grew up with their mother after the father went. This is the ground the whole descent has been digging toward, and it is given with an elegiac warmth the book has withheld until now.
In a basement in 1952 the young Nick shot a man. He was sent to a reformatory and then to Jesuit schooling, and the executive of the first part was made out of that boy. The descent ends here, at the gun, and the reader arrives at the cause last, carrying everything it caused. Told forward, this would be the start of a story of how a Bronx boy became a man of systems; told at the bottom of the book, it is what the systems were built over.
Between the parts, three short interludes, headed for Manx Martin, have followed the ball the other way, forward from the night of the game, while the parts carried the life backward. The two lines meet at the book’s end in the same months. The ball goes up through time as the man goes down, and at the bottom of the book they come within reach of each other.
Movement V
The epilogue comes up into the 1990s, and its subject is what the end of the Cold War left behind. In Kazakhstan waste is destroyed with nuclear explosions underground, the weapon turned at last into a means of disposal. The bomb announced at the Polo Grounds and the waste Nick buries for a living meet on the steppe.
In the Bronx a girl named Esmeralda has been murdered. Crowds gather at a billboard, and when a train’s headlights cross an orange juice advertisement the face of the dead girl is seen in it. Sister Edgar is among the crowd, and the apparition is received by the faithful as a miracle. Then Sister Edgar dies, and the book carries her into a further world, while the epilogue’s last pages pass into a world of screens and linked documents.
“Longing on a large scale is what makes history.” The book began with a crowd, a collective of bodies in a stadium, and it ends with another kind of collective, a web of links on a screen. Its last word stands alone: “Peace.” Whether the word is grace or only the indifference of the screen on which it appears, the book leaves open.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the scale is partly compelled. The reverse order needs its layers: to end on the night of the shooting in 1952, the book must pass down through every layer from 1992, and each layer carries a change in Nick, in Klara and in the country. The ball’s line of owners needs Marvin Lundy; the waste needs Fresh Kills and Kazakhstan; the bomb needs Matt, the bombers and Lenny Bruce’s sets of 1962, which carry the missile crisis as dread. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the matter the layers permit rather than require: the long scenes of Nick’s marriage and its affair in the first part, stretches of Klara’s art-world talk, the chapter of the Texas Highway Killer, which restates a law the book has already set, and the length of several set pieces in the last part. Perhaps a fifth of the whole could go with the knowledge little changed, and the prologue’s separate life shows that the parts can stand alone; but what could go lies inside layers the descent requires, and no layer of the descent could go.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the Cold War was not only a policy but a structure that organised American inner life, binding the bomb and the consumer economy, weapons and waste, so that what a society makes and what it throws away are one system; and its end left the country with its waste, its paranoia and its longing, and no shape to hold them. The action makes it literal. Nick buries the culture’s refuse for a living while his brother models its annihilation; decommissioned bombers are painted as art in the desert; in Kazakhstan the waste is destroyed with nuclear explosions. Under it runs a private disclosure, found by the action: a son who never learned what took his father, and who made himself a man of systems to keep that loss out of sight. Held off the top because much of the theory of waste is spoken by characters rather than found, and part of what is uncovered is an ambient dread.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The heights are high and they recur. The prologue is the summit: a crowd of tens of thousands made one body, the descent of paper from the upper deck, Bruegel’s Triumph of Death settling on Hoover while the Russians’ bomb is news in his ear. Then Sister Edgar among the crowds at a billboard in the Bronx, where the face of a murdered girl, Esmeralda, is seen when a train’s headlights cross an orange juice advertisement; the terraced mass of the Fresh Kills landfill seen whole; the bombers ranked in the desert under Klara’s paint; the waste destroyed underground in Kazakhstan; Lenny Bruce on stage during the missile crisis, his act becoming a cry of fear. Held below the higher reaches because the frequency is uneven across 827 pages: long stretches of the first two parts run level in the deadpan, so that the heights stand out of a plain rather than a range.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The title names the pattern, and much of it is built. The underworld is the waste, the Mob that Nick believes took his father, the underground test, the subway, the Bronx, the unconscious of a culture; and the reverse order of time is a descent through layers, ending in the basement where the boy fired a gun. The ball is a relic in the strict sense, a sacred object passed from hand to hand, sought by a collector and bought at last by Nick, and its line of owners gives the book its spine. The apparition at the billboard is a miracle built into the plot and received by the faithful, and Sister Edgar’s death carries her into a further world. The descent and the relic are load-bearing, and they carry the axis over the bar. What holds it near the bar is diffusion: the myths are many and none is borne by a figure, Nick is not archetypal, and some, the Bruegel and the cloud of unknowing, are emblems rather than structures.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is plain: Dos Passos’s U.S.A., the encyclopedic systems novel of Pynchon and Gaddis, DeLillo’s own Libra, which had already set real figures in a historical fiction, and his compressed novels of the 1980s with their deadpan voice. The turn is in two things. The book reverses its chronology across half a century, so that history is excavated rather than narrated and the reader arrives at causes last; and it took the systems novel, which had held its persons at a distance, and gave it a family, a neighbourhood and an elegiac warmth the earlier DeLillo had withheld. The stake was real: an 827-page book after a career of shorter ones, and a historical novel that refuses the forward drive of its genre. Held below the top because telling a story backward had been done before, the mixing of real and invented figures was established, and the voice is the author’s matured manner.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. Told forward, the book would be the story of how a Bronx boy became a man of systems; told backward, it is an excavation in which every layer is a deposit of the one below, as the landfill is, and the reader digs down to the gun and the lost father knowing what they became. The three interludes of Manx Martin run the other way, so that the ball goes forward while the life goes back, and the two meet at the book’s end in the same months. The prologue, a crowd’s day, and the epilogue, a web of linked documents, frame the half-century as two kinds of collective, the stadium and the network. Held off the top because within the parts the form is looser than the frame: several sections are self-contained episodes that another arrangement would hold as well, and the prologue’s separate life shows the modularity.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence rather than promise. Twenty-nine years of return have built a critical literature large for its age: the book is a central object of the criticism of DeLillo and of late twentieth-century American fiction, read as history, as an archive of waste, as a Catholic novel and as a theory of the Cold War. Events have kept it open: the jacket’s photograph of the twin towers was reread after September 2001, and the epilogue’s turn to linked documents and a world of screens was reread as the internet grew. The questions stay unsettled: whether the ball Nick owns is the true ball; what took his father; whether the closing word is grace or the screen’s indifference. The formal yield is real, in echoes planted hundreds of pages apart. Held below the top because twenty-nine years is a short test, shorter than White Noise’s, and some of the yield lies on the surface, explained by the characters.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is American fiction at the end of the century. The force is high: the book showed that the encyclopedic systems novel could be joined to the realist novel of family and neighbourhood and carried as elegy, and that the history of half a century could be told backward through an object; it is the fullest attempt of its decade at the novel of the nation. The force carries the axis over the bar; what holds it near the bar is that the reach is a standing more than a redirection: no school or practice can be shown to have turned on it, as the later literary Western turned on Blood Meridian, and White Noise remains the more widely taught statement of DeLillo’s turn. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a finalist for the National Book Award for 1997; a place among the runners-up in the New York Times Book Review’s survey of 2006 of the best American fiction of the previous twenty-five years; the prologue’s standing as one of the most read and taught pieces of American fiction of the 1990s; and its part in the arguments about the large social novel that followed.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over twenty-nine years. The text survives whole, as published, with nothing lost and nothing in its fabric to charge. Presence is continuous: the book is taught, and its prologue circulates on its own. Its surface is set in the Cold War, but as history recovered from the 1990s, not as the accident of a production era, and the conditions that produced the book, the decade after the Cold War, have passed while it still reads as pertinent. What holds the axis at the bar is presence: the length limits its general readership, and its standing is a standing among critics and committed readers more than a presence across the culture. Three decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on DeLillo’s English, with no translation between. The prologue is a sustained feat: a present-tense narration that opens on “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” and moves among Cotter Martin, the broadcaster Russ Hodges, Hoover, Sinatra and Gleason, and the crowd, with the cadence of a long play-by-play, ending in a diminuendo. The command of the sentence is the author’s mature one, the deadpan dialogue, the aphorism and the litany, now joined to a lyric warmth in the Bronx sections of the last part and in Sister Edgar’s chapters. The structure, backward with a forward interlude, is handled without confusion across 827 pages. Three charges hold it below the top: many characters speak one stylised register, which flattens persons; Nick’s narration in the first part is deliberately flat and sometimes simply flat; and some set pieces run past their effect.
Score: 8.8 / 10
One law governs the whole: everything is connected, and what is made returns as what is thrown away; the private loss and the public system are one shape. Take the two most distant elements, the crowd at the Polo Grounds in 1951 and the epilogue’s Kazakhstan, where waste is destroyed by nuclear blast. They obey the same law: the bomb announced in the first, its waste in the last; the one ball and the one web. The range is very wide, comic monologue to elegy, documentary history to miracle, and the law holds across it. Charged: some threads attach loosely to the law, the Texas Highway Killer and parts of Klara’s art world, and the epilogue’s move into a world of screens and a nun’s afterlife shifts the physics further than the rest prepares.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Many orders, held in one structure. Consciousness, in Nick’s guarded interior and Sister Edgar’s fear and faith. The family: the Shays, a lost father, a mother, a brother, a marriage. Labour, as waste management and weapons analysis. The state: Hoover and the bureau, the arms race, the bombers. History, across forty years, through real figures. The sacred: the Jesuits, the nuns, the cloud of unknowing, the apparition. The natural order, altered: the desert, the landfill, the poisoned steppe. Art, in Klara and in Bruegel; comedy, in Lenny Bruce; sport, in the game and the ball; race and the city, in Cotter Martin and the Bronx; crime, in the Mob and Nick’s shooting; the media, in broadcast and videotape. They are joined by the ball, the waste and the bomb, which pass through every part: Nick’s work is waste, Matt’s the bomb, Klara’s art the bombers. Held below the top because some orders are thin, the economy beyond waste and the world outside America except as its weapons reach it, and a few are present more than held.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Encompassed at 9.2, then The Unconcealment at 9.0, then The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.9. Many orders, from consciousness and the family to the state, the sacred and a poisoned steppe, joined by three objects, the ball, the waste and the bomb, that pass through every part; a disclosure that holds, that the Cold War bound what a society makes to what it throws away, under which a son makes himself a man of systems to keep a loss out of sight; a history told backward as an excavation, every layer a deposit of the one below, down to the gun and the lost father; and one law, that what is made returns as what is thrown away, holding from the crowd at the Polo Grounds to the waste destroyed on the Kazakh steppe.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2, held by the matter the reverse layers permit rather than require: the long scenes of Nick’s marriage, stretches of Klara’s art-world talk, the chapter of the Texas Highway Killer and the length of several set pieces in the last part, perhaps a fifth of the whole. Next above it, The Imperishable at 8.5, at the bar: twenty-nine years of survival, with a standing among critics and committed readers more than a presence across the culture. Then The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6: myths that are many and diffuse, none borne by a figure and some emblem rather than structure; and a reach that is a standing more than a redirection of what came after.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.9, The Made at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.8, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by a tenth, and The Imperishable meets it exactly at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.2. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.8.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Don DeLillo’s Underworld, published by Scribner, New York, in 1997, 827 pages in the first edition. It is scored as one novel entire: the prologue, “The Triumph of Death”; six parts; three interludes headed for Manx Martin; and the epilogue, “Das Kapital”. The prologue was first published on its own as “Pafko at the Wall” in Harper’s in October 1992 and was later issued as a separate small book; it is scored here only as part of the novel. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on DeLillo’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the first sentence, one sentence on longing and history, and the last word. The titles of the parts are given as the record; the years of the second and fifth parts are not given, being uncertain. Facts that could not be verified, among them the word and chapter counts, the share of dialogue, honours beyond those named, the continuity of the book’s printing and some details of the epilogue’s Kazakhstan, are not given. Citations are by part.