Didn't realize this was just the PROLOGUE to Underworld. Class of him/whomever convinced him to release this as a standalone novella. It's tight and definitely left me wanting more of this world, without even knowing that there was 750pp more where that came from. Fun prose, less speculative/personal than White Noise, but it's going for something distinct, and succeed I think.

DeLlilo just nails the 50s transatlantic fantasia of post WWII, bright-eyed Americana with this book, and what better stage for this picaresque than a baseball game.

The story bounces around the stadium, profiling a young black kid who sneaks into the decisive game three of the October 3rd, 1951 (unbeknownst to me, I read this that day 75 years later. Fun little coincidence) pennant runoff series between the Dodgers and the Giants and finds a seat wherever he can take one, Jedgar Hoover who is in luxury seats with Sinatra, Gleason, etc., and the announcer who is up in the booth (like us), gazing down on it all. These three perspectives get knitted together wonderfully, an the way DeLillo syncopates their perspectives is just so fun. We start with kid Cotter, jumping the turnstiles, enthralled with the invincibility of youth:

He comes down lightly and goes easy-gaiting past the ticket taker groping for his fallen cap and he knows absolutely–knows it all the way, deep as knowing goes, he feels the knowledge start to hammer his runner's heart–that he is invincible.

Russ the commentator looks out over the field, rhetorically forcing to wonder: how could you not be romantic about baseball?

He looks out at the field with its cramped corners and the overcompensating spaces of the deep alleys and dead center. The big square Longines clock that juts up from the clubhouse. Strokes of color all around, a frescoing of hats and faces and the green grandstand and tawny base paths. Russ feels lucky to be here. Day of days and he's doing the game and it's happening at the Polo Grounds–a name he loves, a precious echo of things and times before the century went to war. He think everybody who's her ought to feel lucky because something big's in the works, something's building.

Then, over near the Giants dugout we have Sinatra, Gleason, Toots Shor, and Jedgar who

would rather be at the racetrack but is cheerful enough in this kind of company whatever the venue. He likes to be around gossipmeisters wuch as Walter Winchell, who is also at the game today, sitting with the Dodgers brass. Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination, the static crackle of some libidinous thing in the world, and Edgar response to people who have access to this energy. He wants to be their dearly devoted friend provided their hidden lives are in his private files, all the rumors collected and indexed, the shadow facts made real.

Hoover learns halfway through the game that the Russians have successfully detonated a nuclear bomb for testing. This distracts him from the game. He is responsible for zooming out and taking us with him away from the pleasant distraction of the Big Game (and the novella portraying it). It's Halloween out there.

Flashback to the kid who has been trying to go unnoticed, but has been befriended by some blue collar middle aged dude named Bill Waterson:

Bill says down to him, "I take my seventh-inning stretch seriously. I not only stand. I damn well make it a point to stretch."

"I've been noticing," says Cotter.

"Because it's a custom that's been handed down. It's part of something. It's our own little traditional thing. You stand, you stretch–it's a privilege in a way."

Later on, there's an unmistakable placement of two sentences describing Cotter and Bill as well as some other baseball goers:

Cotter likes this man's singleness of purpose, his insistence on faith and trust . . .

followed on the same page with a metaphor involving superstitious ticks about taping baseball games:

The man doesn't know why he's doing this. It's just an impulse, a fancy, it is like hearing the game twice, it is like being young and being old, and this will turn out to be the only known recording of Russ' famous account of the final moments of the game. The game and its extensions. The woman cooking cabbage. The man who wishes he could be done with drink.

In describing the actual game itself, DeLillo employs Russ to accomplish some awesome little "hey remember this is a book that I wrote" nods to literature as a craft:

Irvin tries to pull it, overeager, and Russ hears the soul of the crowd repeat the sorry arc of the baseball, a moaned vowel falling softly to earth. First baseman puts it away.

(italics my own).

Russ continues to function as a stand-in for DeLillo who provides his own omniscient play-by-play, describing tragedies and foibles occurring about the park:

Two heart attacks, not one. A second man collapses on the field, a well-dressed fellow not exactly falling but letting himself down one knee at a time, slow and controlled, easing down on his right hand and tumbling dully over. No one takes this for a frolick. The man is not the type to do dog tricks in the dirt.

There is a great twist that I won't spoil, but it adds a real sense of danger to the world Dellilo has crafted for us in the stadium, reminding us that there's a nasty world out there in the dog eat dog streets of the city.

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