I read Underworld (1997) this summer, which is a sprawling 800 page book that tracks the second half of 1900s America very loosely narrated around a character, Nick, and his family during this time. DeLillo cuts back and forth between different time periods, and creates a strong contrast between Nick’s rough-and-tumble, communal, Italian-American upbringing in 1950s New York and Nick’s packaged, oversaturated, sterile life as a waste management director in the 1990s Phoenix suburbs.
Coincidentally, at the same time I was reading Upswing (2020) by Robert Putnam. If you’ve taken a college Sociology class, you’d likely know Putnam as being famous for his research about the massive and universal decline of membership in American social organizations (think Rotary Club, Boy/Girl Scouts, unions, churches, etc) and decline in “social capital” from the 1960s until now. “Why is America becoming more lonely?” And “Why has America gone from a nation of ‘We’ to a nation of ‘I’” are two of Putnam’s biggest questions. His most famous work is Bowling Alone (2000) where he really blew this phenomenon open with a rigorously researched book. Upswing elaborates on Bowling Alone and is about the incredible rise and drastic decline of those social organizations over the entire 1900s and its near-complete coincidence with income equality, ‘I’ versus ‘we’, and political polarization (I can’t stress enough how crazy the exact alignment of these phenomena over 120 years are to me).
I thought it was interesting that Don DeLillo felt in himself and was able to express something that would be proven conclusively just a few years later by Putnam. Because Underworld is very much about American connection (among other major themes, to be sure) and it captures this downward trajectory of national camaraderie in a way that feels very real to read, though I didn’t personally live through the whole period.
In a broad way, Don DeLillo wasn’t the only one who felt and expressed this decline. A lot of late 20th century, art seemed to notice the trajectory from “We” to “I,” but it actually tended to celebrate this trend as a long revolution against suffocating mid-century conformity. And on the flip side there’s also been lot of reactionary nostalgia for the mid century among people willing to ignore its glaring lack of social equality for women and minorities. But Underworld is the opposite of the former and seems too human and inclusive in its characters’ perspectives to be the latter, and so I would call Underworld somewhat uniquely perceptive. Is this a sound assessment, and can you think of other books that captured this phenomenon as well?
I’d highly recommend both of these books, but only if you find the topic of post-1950s American social collapse something that really interests you (or baseball or mid-century NYC in the case of Underworld). Underworld is challenging in that it lacks a tight narrative and feels like a very looong and rambling read, but you’re rewarded especially in the last 100 pages, and the prose throughout is excellent. Upswing is challenging in that it’s academic, so even though I found this book absolutely fascinating, the writing is very data-driven and a tad dry and you should be prepared to look at a lot of line graphs. But you don’t need a background in social science to read it or anything.
Does anyone know either of these authors and have any thoughts on the topic?
Have you read any other books that had something interesting to say about the collapse of community and rise of loneliness in America?
by TheCoziestGuava