The Cuban missile crisis (through the voice, as DeLillo has it, of Lenny Bruce).
The withering away and relocation of American manufacturing, and the rise of global capitalism. An era shaped by the advent and then cancellation of the Bretton Woods agreement. Underworld is a novel, quite simply, about what was experienced in the United States in the second half of the 20th century.
These are elemental bits of Underworld – scene, language, detail – that have shaped who I am as a person, as a writer, and yet that also reflect what I care about in a way that precedes their formalisation into language, into art. Om and Bomb, which do not rhyme, and only look that way.
The nun who frets that if the children forget to wear their dog tags, they won’t be saved from nuclear annihilation. Nick Shay’s youthful fantasy, his hopeful treatise, that George the Waiter keeps a room in the basement in the Bronx in order to have paid sex with a woman …
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