Underground.

Underground, by Don DeLillo (Scribner, 827 pp., $27.50)

THE problem with the New York Mets is that, instead of just trying to get to first base, which is a worthy and attainable goal, they always go for the home run and all too often strike out. The problem with much recent American fiction is that, instead of crafting a simple and compelling tale, many of our most respected authors aspire to write the Great American Novel -- and they fall on their faces.

This baseball analogy is apt in the context of Don DeLillo's latest novel, which begins at a baseball game and is shot through with meditations on our national pastime. Like his friend Thomas Pynchon, Mr. DeLillo has just come out with an eight-hundred-page book which, if we are to believe the publicists, is the last word on the American, if not the human, condition. But whereas Pynchon produced in Mason & Dixon what can only be called the Lousy American Novel, Don DeLillo's Underground turns out to be the So-So American Novel. This status is itself no mean achievement, because, as I wrote in reviewing Pynchon's latest book (NR, June 30), the thicker the novel, the more pointless the writing and the story tend to become. This cannot be said of Underground, a fundamentally serious work which never lapses into incoherence and which displays a tonic humility before the art of fiction.

Underground aspires to be a compte rendu of American society in the second half of the twentieth century, starting with Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning homer in 1951 and ending in the radioactive aftermath of the Cold War. Though most of DeLillo's characters are purely fictional, J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, and Jackie Gleason are depicted with the same shrewdness that the author displayed in Libra, an account of the Kennedy assassination. And yet, despite its obsession with recent history, Underground is no traditional historical novel, with all the nostalgia that the label implies. In its postmodernity, the book shares with much current culture an overwhelming consciousness of the approaching Millennium, and this consciousness transfigures the most common objects, from a baseball to a bowl of jello, into something ominously alien. Thus the actual ball that Thomson hits out of the Polo Grounds at the beginning of the novel becomes a totemic object, a Grail which is hunted down through the rest of the novel and which is supposed to symbolize the lost innocence of present-day America.

What is Underground about? Difficult to say. It is the Los Angeles of novels, a massive postindustrial sprawl with little discernible order and no real center; structuring a novel is something DeLillo, like many of his contemporaries, values so little that it hardly even occurs to him as an option. There is a general flatness to the novel's tone and action, an interchangeability, a movement back and forth among the decades, which never leads to anything quite so pedestrian as a climax or a denouement. Its structure consists uniquely in the recurrence of certain characters and themes: Marvin Lundy's search for Thomson's elusive home-run ball, or Klara Sax's attempts to succeed as an artist, or Lenny Bruce's mantra-like schtick, "We're all gonna die!"

The title of the novel refers to the obsession of physicist Nick Shay with the burial of nuclear wastes, subterranean testing of atomic bombs, and disposal of garbage in huge urban dumps. At a metaphorical level, it has to do with DeLillo's equal fascination with that part of present-day reality which is habitually overlooked by those who inhabit it. But none of these themes acquires momentum or builds to a really passionate resolution. This is not to say that the characters themselves lack intensity. They are forever bickering and forever trying to prove their little points, occasionally resorting to violence. But DeLillo's unflappable authorial voice suggests a valium-induced detachment from the situations he describes, and he never allows the reader to become involved in them either.

DeLillo has the weaknesses of his strengths. He is an expert observer of externalities. Like an urban archaeologist, he distances himself from the world in order to see it in an entirely new light, as in this description of a garbage dump: "Specks and glints, ragtails of color appeared in the stratified mass of covering soil, fabric scraps from the garment center, stirred by the wind." This passage, which goes on quite a bit longer, is undeniably excellent writing and keen observation. The problem here, as in DeLillo's earlier works, is that the accumulation of a million fine details no more captures the soul of a character or a situation than the million hairs and follicles of a stuffed lion can be said to render accurately its erstwhile vitality. Allied to this is a kind of finessing of the obvious. DeLillo has an excellent ear for dialogue. But he is so enamored of this gift that he enlists it beyond any conceivable service to a given scene. A typical example is an exchange between a man and a woman:

"'I think he knows,' she said.

"'What?'

"'I think he knows.'

"'He doesn't know.'

"'I think he knows."'

This constant finessing brings up another issue that criticism consistently disregards these days: it is eminently possible for novels to be overlong. As the young Henry James asserted in a review of Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, "Almost all [current] novels are greatly too long and the being too long becomes with each elapsing year a more serious offense." This opinion is a little odd coming from James, whose several virtues did not include concision. And surely there were greater offenders against the getting to the point, as he might put it, than Hardy. But in a general way James was right in his diagnosis of Victorian literature, and he would be only more correct in regard to some of our most esteemed contemporaries. Underground could have been cut to a third of its present length, losing none of its point and greatly enhancing such strengths as it has. But, of course, no self-respecting author who aspires to write the Great American Novel could ever be content with a measly three hundred pages. The bidding for that superlunary honor starts somewhere after page six hundred.