Meanwhile, a gay newspaper called The Works set up a hotline and published a profile of the then-unidentified Eyler.
Shortly after, people started to become suspicious of his behavior. After murdering more victims, Eyler moved to Indianapolis in the summer of 1983 and became a member of a local gay community. Three days later, Eyler dumped the body of a double header named John Roach near Belleville. Later on, the body of John Johnson was found in a field outside Belshaw, Indiana. Townsend was subsequently hospitalized but fled from the hospital before police could investigate his case.
That same month, Eyler beat and attempted to kill Craig Townsend, but Townsend escaped before Eyler could finish the job. A month later, the body of Robert Foley was discovered, having been dumped outside of Joliet, Illinois. Days later, Eyler stabbed Steven Crockett several times. Nine months later, Eyler strangled a youth named Delvoyd Baker and dumped his body on the roadside north of Indianapolis. Long survived, and Eyler was subsequently arrested and pleaded guilty, being fined $43.įour years after stabbing Long, Eyler stabbed another man named Jay Reynolds, killing him. There, Eyler stabbed a young man named Craig Long for no apparent reason. Sporadic enrollment in college between 19 left Eyler without a degree, and he moved to Terre Haute that same year. Unbeknownst to his friends and family, he struggled coping with homosexual tendencies, even going as far as to hate himself for being gay. In his senior year, Eyler dropped out of high school and earned his GED years later. His parents divorced while he was still young, which resulted in him having many stepfathers, who all teased and abused him. Through fragments and interlaced stories-including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others-DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled.Eyler was born in Crawfordsville, Indiana, as the youngest of four children. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. "It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter-the "shot heard around the world"-and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the Cold War and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying.