These are things I don’t forget: a secretary in a Mondrian dress. A 60s sexy secretary. And advertising. And Mondrian. A man who grabs an oil drum with a fire burning inside it, drags the drum toward baseball fans, fathers and sons lined up on a cold night to buy World Series tickets. This scene is in the early 50s and the man is black, the fans white … The hot metal sears his hand when he drags the oil drum. He pretends it does not. His burned hand scars the reader’s memory, her emotions pressed on by this subtle scene.

A Jesuit priest who asks his student, Nick Shay, to name the parts of a shoe, and Nick Shay cannot, and neither can you.

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 …

The nun who frets that if the children forget to wear their dog tags, they won’t be saved from nuclear annihilation.

Om and Bomb, which do not rhyme, and only look that way.

❦

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.

Underworld is a novel, quite simply, about what was experienced in the United States in the second half of the 20th century. An era shaped by the advent and then cancellation of the Bretton Woods agreement. Nuclear proliferation. The withering away and relocation of American manufacturing, and the rise of global capitalism. Jazz. The Cuban missile crisis (through the voice, as DeLillo has it, of Lenny Bruce). Civil rights. The CIA. Bombs on university campuses. Artists on New York rooftops, and around them, the old industrial framework of bygone city life, something aesthetic and exotic, either marvelled at or ignored.

This is a novel that restores luminous pockets of lost life, most strikingly in the Bronx – the ravaged South Bronx where one elusive character, Esmeralda, is sacrificed – and the mid-century street scenes of Arthur Avenue, which DeLillo himself would have known, the children’s games that “take a pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion”, and the “screechsong” of old laundry lines drawn through rusted pulleys, a realm produced, one senses strongly, from DeLillo’s own memories, made vivid in the act of writing the book.

‘Luminous pockets of lost life, most strikingly in the South Bronx’ are brought to life. Photograph: Alain Le Garsmeur/Getty Images

The book is itself an act of memory. And while big structures of history shape the characters (as they do us), this novel is also filled with glimpses of people alone and together with their private faiths, their unspeakable thoughts, artfully converted to language, into naked epiphany, subtle and precise.

Underworld starts in 1951, the night that Bobby Thomson hit the home run that won the New York Giants the National League pennant. The novel then jumps forward to the early 1990s, and from there moves more or less directly backward to the night of the home run, which, as one character puts it, “was maybe the last time people spontaneously went out of their houses for something. Some wonder. Some amazement”. Because then people fracture and retreat. Their shared experiences are media spectacles they merely observe, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, fear of a nuclear first strike, or a second one. Plots whose constructedness makes its impact on people separately and simultaneously, one person in a darkened room to the next.

As a child of the 20th century, I suppose, this book speaks to me. It precipitates into meaning movies I’ve seen, books I’ve read, quotes I know by heart, like a line from Robert Oppenheimer’s letter to a friend in his freshman year at Harvard: “My two great loves are physics and desert country. It’s a pity they can’t be combined.” Om and Bomb do not rhyme, but they interlinked on a mesa called Los Alamos, and in the desert expanse of God’s felt absence, atomic fires were lit, leading some, such as the French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to consider the “spiritual repercussions of the atom bomb”. I remember Watergate as the single time the adults in my house watched television, angling a bent coat-hanger for reception. I remember Lenny Bruce, never mind that he died two years before I was born – his ghost rose, there was a feature film, he was a household name. Another ghost in every home was the spectre of nuclear war, which kids thought about, talked about, dreamed about, all through the 1970s and 80s. “Om” – a resonance or divine energy, a common soul, maybe, was a popular concept imported from Hinduism, and scientific horror had invaded that soul. At 15, I worked at a science museum founded by Oppenheimer’s younger brother Frank, a particle physicist who emanated a tone – not “om” – a vibratory constant awareness of doom, or so I was convinced.

What I don’t know directly of the history in Underworld, I know through inheritance, my parents’ lives. My father, two years younger than DeLillo, was educated by communists, not Jesuits, and is Jewish, not Italian. But what does my personal experience, the lowly intimate grit of the reader, have to do with this epic novel? Nothing and everything. It is a book for a person like me, formed and cross-hatched by the history the novel’s pages traverse, and it will also be for new generations, like the ones that Walt Whitman imagined, whom he addressed, in the poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”: the people of the future.

Some authors go for sweep, others for sentences, and yet Underworld is both. Sentence by sentence, it may have the highest density of great sentences of all DeLillo’s novels, at two or three times as long as the rest. How did he sustain it? I have no idea, and the how is not for me to wonder. The book exists. It raises the bar on what can be done. Its 827 pages are filled with hell-bent ambition, and yet also a deep reserve of uncommon, even egoless humility: DeLillo never insists, never veers into showy knowledge or egregious or paranoid plot. He merely goes to the horizon-line of his furthest understanding, and plumbs his love of, and respect for, the great mysteries inside us, between us, among us.

The book is filled with echoes, and yet the storylines, the set pieces, are not overconnected into false or forced verisimilitude. Instead, rhymes of various sorts layer to produce meaning. Take Moonman 157, a Bronx graffiti artist, and the Texas Highway Killer: what do they have in common? One wields spray cans, the other a .38 with a gloved left hand. Moonman paints subway cars, and the Texas Highway Killer shoots random lone drivers. They both create languages that rise up, become visible, in the fog of collective life; each language is expressed by an individual who remains anonymous. As a natural consequence, they each have imitators.

Graffiti on a New York subway. Photograph: PR

Then there’s Moonman 157 and Klara Sax, a feminist ideal of Land Art (ambition, work crews, the endless real estate of the west). What do they have in common? Genealogy. The graffiti is first; Klara’s more culturally legitimated art comes after. To graffiti is to bomb. He bombs train cars, she bombs bombers, defunct B-52s. Moonman announces himself to the commuters who see his work flash by, the people on the 5:10 to Dreamland. Klara Sax talks into the twin vacuums of historical time and the desert. She’s going larger-scale, and for a more abstract audience.

A few more echoes: what do a baseball and the radioactive core of a nuclear reactor have in common? They are both the same size. Sister Edgar (the aforementioned nun) and J Edgar Hoover? Aside from their shared name, they are people haunted by their own convictions. People who know too much. What do Jayne Mansfield’s breasts remind adolescent Eric of? The bumper bullets on a Cadillac. Eric whose explosion of pubescent desire does not take place in a void (nothing does), but in his own epoch, the 1950s. His family resembles a full-colour product brochure with a bomb-shaped shadow darkening its pages. His mother is entranced by Jell-O. Meanwhile, Eric masturbates into a condom that reminds him, with its metallic sheen, of a surface-to-surface missile with a 40-kiloton warhead. Eric engages in his secret activity behind closed fibreglass curtains while his father, with nothing to hide, “simonizes” the family car in the breezeway. What connects boy and man, one acting in secret, the other openly? They are both engaged in the physical act of polishing. Both actions are borne along by dreams.

Some connections are more direct, but also more subtle, hidden in the deeper structure of the book. Like the woman who shows up, seemingly out of nowhere, on a Freedom Ride bus in Jackson, Mississippi. She’s a logical descendant of the backward chronological march into tumult, but she is also another character’s daughter. And there is Eric Deming, Matt Shay’s colleague in weapons work: same Eric who, as a boy, compared his condom to a warhead and ate Hydrox cookies “because the name sounded like rocket fuel”. These links are not what Matt Shay calls the clammy hand of coincidence. They are the cunning hand of history: inevitability, but in the form of drift.

My favourite passage connects to nothing else, really. Instead, it thickens the tone of the novel, producing harmonies. A man and woman travel across America in a lowered 1950 Mercury – hers. They argue and make love and go to drive-in movies. It is a brief few pages, “the scene of a whole long brutal marriage compressed into weeks”. They stop in Bisbee, Arizona, and Bakersfield, California, and the prose, both grave and ironic, evokes the reckless intensity of the passions of the young. The male character seems to be Nick Shay, in a passage of his life that did not last, and its temporary nature is inlaid into the scene itself, in its status as a one-off: some of what defines us, permanently, is not lasting. Maybe even much of what defines us is not lasting.

Which is why the eternal fate of Sister Edgar becomes the major miracle of the novel. Sister Edgar, whose excitement, whose jouissance was destruction, gets subsumed into the multitude, into ecstasy, a human ecstasy and also a religious one. If the human swell in which she loses and finds herself is a bit more Fellini-esque than the thousands pouring through the turnstiles of the baseball stadium, it is no less affecting. Collective streams are real, a crowd has a personality.

The symphonic sequence of the baseball game seen through the lens of Whitman … Photograph: Tony Tomsic/MLB Photos via Getty Images

“He speaks in your voice, American,” so the opening of Underworld goes, introducing one boy whose yearnings echo those of the masses converging on the stadium. This is Whitman territory and tone. The “you” is a Whitman you, and the entire symphonic sequence of the baseball game can be seen through the lens of Whitman, of crowds of passengers on Brooklyn Ferry, of the certainty of others, of fires from foundry chimneys, of all sights “to me the same as they are to you”.

DeLillo has written of crowds before, in Mao II, and he has cited, from John Cheever’s journals (where Cheever’s greatest writing took place), the following passage, on a night spent in Shea Stadium: “Who do these people think they are? They are who they are. Fathers with sons. Some good-looking women.” Cheever calls the spectacle of the ballpark “apocalyptic”, and says, famously, “the task of the American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of the window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball”.

DeLillo took up Cheever’s challenge, but then he put the adulterous woman in, too – in fact, more than one of them, although they don’t quite seem to suffer from the primly middle-class “misgivings” to which Cheever refers. Cheever’s self-lacerating reference to the woman, his own less exalted artistic terrain, need not be expelled from literature, of course. But it is the crowd that links Underworld to a certain poetic tradition, from Emerson to Whitman to Thoreau to Crane, then Stevens: the American sublime, which, as Harold Bloom has said, “is always also an American irony”. Jayne Mansfield. Bumper bullets. Dog tags as protection from nuclear war.

The final two lines of Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” are these:

You furnish your parts toward

eternity.

Great or small, you furnish your parts

toward the soul.

This is what Esmeralda does, a martyr of the South Bronx and the nuns who try to save her. The martyr of this novel. It is what Sister Edgar does, first wilfully, in devoting herself to God, and then miraculously, by ascending into cyberspace, “the lunar milk of the data stream”, a collectivity of brain or soul (what Teilhard de Chardin called the “noosphere”), which seems to forecast both the death of the printed book and the eternal life of some new universal mind, or in Whitman’s terms, “soul”. Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

Finally, it is what Don DeLillo has done, in writing this magnificent book, which is filled with grace, furnished of experience, of wisdom, of sacrifice, of insights that continue for hundreds of pages, all different, perfect and true. It is a book that will have its place in the lunar milk, the collective soul, a work of art delivered over to the crowds to come.

Rachel Kushner’s novels include The Flamethrowers. Don DeLillo’s Underworld is reissued as a Picador Classic this month.