Wow, what an interesting group of people to attend a baseball game together! We have Jackie Gleason (actor, won a best supporting actor award for Hustler), Frank Sinatra (incredibly famous singer and actor), Toots Shor (a club owner), and J. Edgar Hoover (head of the FBI). This scene strikes me as so hilarious and interesting. We have paranoid, nervous Hoover just waiting for something bad to happen, and it does-- he receives information during the game! Jackie Gleason is entertaining adoring fans, playing the buffoon, throwing out jokes and bringing out some of his best characters. Frank Sinatra is incredibly uncomfortable with the fans pressed close around him and he gets more and more irritated as the scene gets on. ("Frank doesn't have his dago secret service with him today"). And of course, Toots Shor, whom we don't hear much about. He is a thick, big, ex-bouncer who likes to drink a lot. I think this makes for a very interesting introduction. I really have no idea what the significance of this star-studded baseball game is, but it makes me very excited for the rest of the book. I am already hooked!
Yeah, it's a strong start, I agree!
I agree. The prologue (especially the characters) really grabs the readers attention--as DeLillo says, "fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination,"(17) and both are definitely present in the prologue.
I wonder how much of a part these famous characters are going to play throughout the rest of the novel. After the prologue through page 100, they're not mentioned again (to the best of my knowledge). I would find it difficult to incorporate these famous people into such a huge fictional account. But, knowing how the encyclopedic narrative works, I'm guessing they'll all reappear at some point or another.
I'm hoping they will. However, I fear that they may simply be a metaphor for something larger that is presented later in the novel. I'm definitely liking it, though!
I think it's funny that DeLillo clumped these four men together; the group dynamic is certainly...unusual. I like Edgar's character a lot. I just think a lot of what he thinks/likes is amusing. For example, "Edgar hates Harry Truman, he would like to see him writhing on a parquet floor, felled by chest pain" (28) and "Edgar loves this stuff. Edgar, Jedgar. Admit it- you love it. It causes a bristling of his body hair. Skeletons with wispy dicks." (50) There's some interesting stuff about him up on Wikipedia.
Yeah, I Wikipedia'd all these guys to see if there was some significance in the characters Delillo grouped together. I feel like they must each represent some section of the U.S, world, an attitude towards war, something... Maybe I'm still in GR mode thinking that everything is a metaphor, but there must be something significant here.
Also, according to this site, http://perival.com/delillo/underworld_triumph.html,
these four really COULD have been watching the 1951 game together:
"As for the possibility that Sinatra, Shor, Gleason and Hoover being at the game, well, perhaps it's not entirely implausible (DeLillo says he found that all four were at the game). Arnold Shaw's book, Sinatra: Twentieth Century Romantic (1968), places Sinatra in New York on September 26, 1951; "he was in New York conferring with CBS on his new TV Series." By November 2, he was applying for a marriage license with Ava Gardner. Sinatra was friends with Toots Shor - in 1946, "Frank and Toots Shor had planned to sit together" at the Louis-Conn championship fight."
I like that Delillo is working with historical fact (like the mention of the painting that really was in Life magazine on that day).