The New Canon is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on great works of fiction published since 1985. These books represent the finest literature of the current era, and are gaining recognition as the new classics of our time. In this installment of The New Canon, Gioia looks at Underworld by Don DeLillo.

When The New York Times surveyed 124 writers and critics to determine the best work of American fiction during the last twenty-five years, Don DeLillo’s Underworld finished in second place with eleven votes. Only Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which received fifteen votes, ranked ahead of DeLillo’s massive 1997 novel.

Almost a half-century of history is crammed into Underworld, and the constant interaction of the diverging plot lines with pop culture events and socio-political milestones adds to the piquant flavor of this rambling novel. Underworld starts with a famous 1951 baseball game, when Giant Bobby Thomson hits a game-winning home run, the so-called “shot heard ‘round the world.” The book wraps up 827 pages later in cyberspace, where “everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered and linked, hyper-linked. . . . World without end, amen.”

DeLillo, for his part, steers clear of obvious links and hyperlinks in this massive work. Instead he jumps freely, and without warning, from vignette to vignette, character to character, decade to decade. DeLillo’s approach is essentially cinematic, based on masterfully conceiving and executing discrete scenes and making generous use of flashbacks. This large novel defies our expectations of linear narrative flow, and is instead built carefully, lovingly out of these isolated tableaus, each one possessing a drive and vitality of its own. DeLillo creates a unified whole through juxtaposition and contrast. To some extent, the chronology reverses the typical future-directed timeline of most fiction, and DeLillo himself has likened the structure of the book to the countdown to zero that precedes a missile or rocket launch

Occasionally DeLillo will hold on to a setting and situation at length, as in the opening ballgame narrative, which unfolds leisurely over sixty pages, and involves a wide cast of characters. But more often DeLillo presents brief, potent interludes of only a few pages, which he sets up and delivers with a sure touch, and quickly abandons for the next stop on our itinerary. DeLillo is the master of discontinuity, and the moment you start to settle into the narrative flow is just when you can count on a change in scenery.