Underworld.

The reviewers of Don DeLillo's eleven novels have called him many things: a "systems novelist," the chief shaman of the "paranoid school of American fiction," a cultural critic who works in the form of the novel. Now he is being called one of the immortals. In the New York Times Book Review, Martin Amis, ducking the question about the new book, put DeLillo up where serious readers have placed him for years. "While Underworld may or may not be a great novel," Amis wrote, "there is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great novelist."

No one as far as I know has called DeLillo a religious writer. Nevertheless, religious language, themes, and imagery are thick on the ground in his work. His last few novels directly address the role of faith in contemporary life. In particular, he has dramatized the notion that skeptical moderns look with a kind of gratitude to religious people, who serve as surrogate believers, keeping open the possibility of belief for those who themselves cannot believe.

DeLillo also has described the nature of fiction in religious terms. Fiction requires a kind of belief from the reader and offers a kind of consolation. As DeLillo explained in connection with Libra (1988), about the Kennedy assassination: "The novelist can try to leap across the barrier of fact, and the reader is willing to take that leap with him as long as there's a sort of redemptive truth waiting on the other side, a sense that we've arrived at a resolution." For the writer, DeLillo remarked recently, the solitary daily work of crafting fiction can be "a kind of religious fanaticism, with elements of obsession, superstition, and awe."

DeLillo's new novel, Underworld, is the best novel you'll have trouble remembering. For 600 pages you feel DeLillo is taking you somewhere major, even if you don't know where or how. But the novel gets away from the author, and it does so, in part, because he plays fast and loose with the ideas about religion that he has humanized more successfully in earlier books.

DeLillo was born in 1936, grew up in the Bronx, and went to Cardinal Hayes High School and Fordham there. In interviews he regularly brings up his old-school Italian Catholic background. "I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood," he remarked in 1991. "For a Catholic, nothing is too important to discuss or think about, because he's raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and that if he doesn't live his life in a certain way this death is simply an introduction to an eternity of pain. This removes a hesitation that a writer might otherwise feel when he's approaching important subjects, eternal subjects."

For this reader, the Catholic imprint in DeLillo's work is best discerned in the mystic wonder for the things of the world he expresses in his prose. As Mark Feeney pointed out in Commonweal (August 9, 1991), "In all DeLillo's books an almost medieval sense of immanence collides with a clinical delight in the amassing of data." Whereas so many contemporary writers dramatize a lack of meaning or a hunger for meaning, DeLillo sees a superabundance of meaning, and sees the artist's task the human task as that of identifying the competing meanings and figuring out how they fit together. For example, in DeLillo's work the suburban supermarket, with its profusion of brightly packaged and test-marketed goods, is not just a wasteland of fruitless diversions, but is a world of signs which, if we can decipher it, can tell us who we are.

In his recent novels, partly as a way to capture that sense of the superabundance of meaning, perhaps, DeLillo has described seemingly mundane aspects of contemporary culture in religious terms. The protagonist of White Noise (1984), Jack Gladney, is the chairman of a college department of Hitler studies. He is a kind of priest of the religion of popular culture, "the cults of the famous and the dead." But the works and pomps of popular culture and its attractive diversions cannot allay the more primordial fear of death, so Gladney has to commit a murder to banish it.

In Libra, the stand-in for the novelist is Nicholas Branch, who is writing a history of the assassination for the CIA twenty-five years after Kennedy's death. "There is much here that is holy," he cryptically reflects, "an aberration in the heartland of the real." Branch is depicted as a solitary figure "in the great sheltering nave of the Agency." His religion, so to speak, is not conspiracy theorizing but the sifting and ordering of all the data about the assassination. He is a mystic of the facts.

Mao II (1991) is a kind of skeleton key to DeLillo's work in which the art of fiction-making becomes a kind of religion itself. Standing apart from the modern crowd is the reclusive writer Bill Gray, who likens his own shyness to "God's famous reluctance to appear." As Gray sees it, a serious writer is like a terrorist or a religious fanatic in his need to assert his truth against a hostile or indifferent society. In the modern world, however, the writer has yielded his cultural power to headline-catching terrorists, and now he envies them their influence. "Who do we take seriously?" Gray's editor asks him. "Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith."

As DeLillo finds religious impulses behind the appearances of contemporary life, he depicts religion itself as a game of appearances. A scene in White Noise suggests that it is the pretense of faith, not faith itself, that is the key to understanding the continuing power of religion in the modern world. At the climax of the novel, Jack Gladney shoots and wounds a drug addict named Willie Mink. After giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation - in a scene that is a kind of medieval tableau rendered in staccato, end-of-the-century English - Gladney takes him to "a place with a neon cross over the entrance." It is headquarters of a group of German nuns in black habits and heavy shoes. Their mission is "to embody-old things." However, they don't possess real faith, they only pretend to. But they see nothing false in this. Rather, they see the pretense to faith as having a genuine dedication all its own. It too entails a serious life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. The head nun explains:

As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe.... Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.

The nuns are DeLillo's surrogate believers, keeping faith on behalf of the human race. This, I think, is a shrewd and uncanny insight into the way we live now. It helps to explain why religion is still so strong a force in our supposedly secular society, and why so many people nominally against religion have failed to eradicate it the way they have claimed they would for centuries now. And it goes a long way toward explaining the psychology of the legions of lapsed Catholics who no longer believe but remain emotionally bound to it.

This need for surrogate believers is apparently a key idea for DeLillo, for he develops it further in Mao II and Underworld. In Mao II, the photographer Britta Nilsson has traveled the world. She has photographed saints' days in Spain, the Day of the Virgin in Mexico City, the Day of Blood in Tehran. "I need these people to believe for me," Britta tells Bill Gray. "I cling to believers. Many, everywhere. Without them, the planet goes cold." Now she photographs only writers, the implication being that writers are the next best thing to true believers - surrogate believers for rational and educated people in the West, making art of the religious impulses we don't dare act on in our own lives.

In his latest novel, Underworld, DeLillo measures the effects of the long nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. He insists that the cold war, surely the most metaphysical of political confrontations, called forth a parallel "underworld" culture of quasi-religious ritual and self-expression. "This is the supernatural underside of the cold war," one character remarks. "Miracles and visions." Underworld also dramatizes the idea that life during the cold war, life under the constant threat of universal annihilation, engendered a world-spirit in which all people participate by virtue of their common dilemma. "Everything," we are told, "is connected in the end."

The novel's action flows away from its remarkable prologue, set during the 1951 playoff game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. All through the game, J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason, and Frank Sinatra banter back and forth; after the Giants win the pennant on Bobby Thomson's "shot heard round the world," a white businessman and a black teen-ager grapple for the home-run ball. What follows is a kind of "deep inward tunneling" into the seemingly random associations of American culture in search of the American soul.

For about 750 pages, the reader follows the ball - irradiated with the power of the past - as it shows up in the hands of various characters. The narrative rewinds from the present to the 1950s' romance between Nick Shay (now a "waste analyst" who oversees landfills) and housewife Klara Sax (now a conceptual artist who paints decommissioned bombers). At the same time, in a series of long, ambitious set pieces, the novel dramatizes different aspects of the cold-war-era "underworld": arms stockpiling in the Southwest, avant-garde art and film in SoHo, subway graffiti in the South Bronx.

None of the characters in these episodes is all that interesting or memorable. We learn a great deal about them as DeLillo takes us "inside the human works, down to dreams and routine rambling thoughts," in the way of James Joyce. Still, they never really live on the page. DeLillo's own prose style and organizational intelligence are so strong that the characters seem like themes with bodies and surnames.

In the past, DeLillo has countered this by devising strong, relentless plots. Not so this time. To tell the truth, in Underworld there isn't much of a story. Rather, the material is organized thematically, with DeLillo relentlessly making the different episodes reprise one another and then piling them up, as in a landfill, or in memory. The "underworld," it is clear, is also the shared past which shapes each of us.

For example, Moonman, a master subway graffiti artist from the 1970s, dedicates himself, in the 1990s, to painting a tableau of "angels" - visages of children murdered in the neighborhood - on a bombed-out building in the South Bronx. DeLillo is making a social point through this development, even suggesting the arc of his own writing over the past two decades. Moonman's art of "wildstyle" personal expression, which mirrored the belligerence of the cold war, is now an art of public consolation.

In the neighborhood, Moonman meets Shay's old grammar-school teacher, Sister Edgar, who now performs works of mercy on the streets. Edgar is the character who must bear the heaviest burden of symbolism in the novel. She is called Edgar for no reason other than that the name makes her the symbolic "sister" to J. Edgar Hoover. Although her religious order has gone modern, she still wears "the old things with the arcane names, the wimple, cincture, and guimpe" - again, for no reason other than to represent "the old rugged faith," the ideological twin to cold-war paranoia.

Dressing her up in the old garb also makes it possible - crucially - for DeLillo to have strangers recognize Edgar as a nun at the end of the book. A crowd has gathered, and they believe they have seen a miracle: a vision of a murdered girl flashing on a billboard. Seeing the nun nearby, they spontaneously embrace her. Skeptical at first, Sister Edgar comes to feel as if she has seen the miracle, too. "Everything feels near at hand, breaking upon her, sadness and loss and glory and an old mother's bleak pity and a force at some deep level of lament that makes her feel inseparable from the shakers and the mourners."

No less than the German nuns in White Noise, Sister Edgar is a surrogate believer, whose visible presence and apparent faith are meant to reassure the faint of heart and keep the planet from going "cold." However, whereas the nuns in White Noise appeared as walk-ons in a satire, Sister Edgar is a character in a realistic novel. Whereas they frankly introduced themselves as symbols, DeLillo wants us to take this walking symbol as a complicated human being.

What's more, we are asked to identify with Sister Edgar at the climax of the novel. After 800 pages, it is as if DeLillo needs some kind of miracle to bring the novel to a satisfactory end. Making Sister Edgar see a miracle, DeLillo wants the reader, as it were, to see a miracle as well. She believes, so we are to believe with her.

But it doesn't work. The fictional machinery creaks and groans: long sentences, stretched metaphors, hushed incantation, all straining for significance. DeLillo, so good at explaining the world, goes on to explain Underworld and the way he wants it to be read, manipulating the reader from behind Sister Edgar's habit. Whereas in classical drama the deus ex machina was flown in from above, in Underworld the divine contraption that will save the day is brought in from below.

So it is that Underworld, DeLillo's most exhaustive novel and in many ways his most hopeful, is also the one that offers the least consolation. Everything is connected in the end, yes, but the connections don't emerge from the world we live in or the one depicted in the novel. They exist in the pattern the author has self-consciously elaborated.

Let me explain in DeLillo's own terms. The trick of fiction, I think, is to make a complex premeditated plan seem surprising and inevitable, to find a pattern on the page that somehow resembles the patterns in the world outside the window or those inside our heads. To do this, the novelist, like the terrorist, must in some ways conceal his plan.

In Underworld, though, the plan is out in the open. Plan and pattern are the whole point of the book. It is as if DeLillo is saying to the reader, "Everything is connected in the end - watch me make the connections better than anybody, and leap into the ranks of the great novelists." But his exertions get in the way of the realistic materials he is using to build his book. Where DeLillo seems to want us to share his awe in the face of contemporary life, we are distracted by his striving to create an awesome work. In the end, the reader - at least this reader - feels the lack not only of the redemptive truth DeLillo's art has promised, but of interesting characters, a strong story, a whole and radiant design: all the homely things of fiction by which the novelist elicits the reader's belief, the writer being, in the end, not a priest or a mystic or a fanatic, but only a novelist.

Paul Elie is a regular contributor to Commonweal.