...Canty’s masterly, affecting The Underworld, is less about an abysmal hell than the purgatory of survival in a spiritually and literally toxic small town ... As vivid as his descriptions of the Silver Valley are, Canty’s real genius lies in his subtly drawn depiction of the emotional and psychological landscape of this 'big incomprehensible thing' ... In spare, moving prose, Canty brilliantly captures the tragic contradictions of this dark spring, and of lives stubbornly laid down for profit in tainted earth that daily reclaims its own.
Canty is a skilled observer of his female characters, rendering them well, and of the space they make for themselves. Lyle, meanwhile, starts as essentially a cipher before gradually emerging on the page through his personal longing in the thick of the mine's darkness. The other men—Malloy, Ray, Ray and David's father, and more—remain, to greater and lesser degrees, inaccessible, and this is no doubt the author's choice, the kind of shadow his novel throws ... The Underworld evokes with great spirit the wide-open feeling of Idaho, the small humans populating it with their outsized dramas that shout through the pervading silence, the ever-presence of televised Nixon and cigarettes and clouds in the sky. Canty's talent is the kind that doesn't call attention to itself, and without contextual info it's easy enough, for a New Yorker at least, to believe the novel was written by a native.
The narrative problem Canty faces is this: His characters - with a couple of exceptions, including David and Lyle - are not likable. But Canty makes it clear that the mine owners are more detestable ... Likable or not, the lives of these desperate folk are interesting and realistic in raw sort of way, and the tragedy they are forced to face makes them worthy of sympathy and respect.
Canty is a great storyteller with a keen eye for detail and a superb talent for juggling a plethora of characters and storylines. What he pulls off here in writing about an entire town is something most other contemporary literary fiction writers would fail at. There is a lot of pain and anger in the narrative, but it never becomes overly dramatic or repetitive, and that speaks volumes about the author's talent. That being said, this novel could have used a few editorial trimmings. For starters, the first fourth of it is just the author setting the place up for the disaster. Having an eye for detail is great, but when those details are allowed to run free, the risk of bogging down the narrative increases exponentially, and a bit of that happens here ... The novel could have started with the fire and it would have been much shorter and still contained all the best (and by best I mean emotionally devastating) parts.
His latest novel, The Underworld, is based on a real event. On May 2, 1972, a reported 173 miners went to work, as they did every day, at the Sunshine Silver Mine in Shoshone County, Idaho ... With that tragedy at its epicenter, Canty constructs a brittle, shattered world around the fallout ... Such are the ingredients of life’s darkest hours, and though Canty delivers when describing the fire — including a few interwoven chapters detailing the nail-biting rescue of the two trapped survivors — where he really excels is getting to the heart of the hurt ...like much of Canty’s fiction, it’s an honest portrait of two lost souls trying to make sense of the hand they’ve been dealt, the choices they’ve made and have yet to make.
...[a] stunning and deeply moving novel ... a complex portrayal of trauma, grief, and how to find light in the darkness—quite literally, in fact, in the case of Lyle, an older miner trapped underground after the accident, who is forced to confront the meaning of his life and what might come next if he is saved. The voices of these characters are as memorable as their struggle to keep going in the face of tragedy.
Canty has a keen eye for details in this setting and suitably dry, spare prose ... One nit: the quantity of booze consumed may be realistic but it’s also dispiriting, no pun intended, and may sap a reader’s sympathy. Canty does a fine job of showing how disaster can lacerate a place or people without utterly.
