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Underworld

3.93 of 5 stars 3.93 · rating details · 11,621 ratings · 943 reviews

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.

Underworld opens with a breathlessly gracefu...more 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.

Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. 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. 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. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. 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 all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.(less)

Paperback, 827 pages

Published 1998 by Picador (first published October 3rd 1997)

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Nov 23, 2012 Paul rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels

THE PILGRIM 'S HEART IS LIGHT AT THE COMMENCEMENT OF HIS JOURNEY

So I will strap on my backpack and don sturdy walking boots, an oxygen tank might be useful, and a supply of plasters and animal pelts - and then I will begin to scale the North Face of Modern American Literature. Let's see how far I get before I fall off one of its jagged cliffs or collapse choking with one of Mr DeLillo's sentences wrapped around my neck.

BUT DISCOURAGEMENTS ARISE UNBIDDEN

Update - Not even on page 100 and I have a...more

53 likes · like · see review

Nov 21, 2009 karen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-everyone-loves-but-me, littry-fiction

seriously, why does everyone suck this book's dick so much?

this book was recommended to me by an ex (who also recommended zuleika dobson and the joke, so he had a good track record until then) who knew how much i liked infinite jest so he thought i would like this one. and if i only liked infinite jest because it was a long book written by a white male, then i suppose i would have liked this book. but i didn't, so it must be something else i'm drawn to in the wallace.

i remember i was reading th...more

72 likes · like · see review

Oct 03, 2007 Ethan Fixell rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: masochists

i've only put down three books in my entire life.

the first was Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," which i absolutely loved but got terribly sick of after about 700 pages of the same goddamn philosophy being crammed down my throat. (which sounds like its awful, but i really did adore those first two thirds).

the second was a speed reading book. it wasn't a very quick read, and i got bored.

the third is now Don DeLillo's Underworld, supposedly one of the greatest masterpieces of 20th century literature.

i...more

47 likes · like · see review

Dec 27, 2011 Noce rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: narrativa-americana

Underwear: l’abbigliamento intimo dell’America.

Guardando Facebook, mi sono resa conto che il mio paese di mare (specifico di mare, perché di solito sto in un paesone di montagna, così quelli che sanno chi sono non vengono sotto casa a lanciarmi le uova marce) limita le scelte della gente. O la gente limita il paese, bah, chi lo sa!

Insomma: curiosando nei profili degli amici degli amici ( dove “degli amici” non è una ripetizione, è proprio che ficco il naso nelle cose dei terzi), mi sono accorta...more

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Aug 06, 2011 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars

Don DeLillo is a first-rate modern writer: his clipped and adamantine use of words, his compacted sentences and digitalized detail, all come together to tell his stories in a taut and invigorating manner—and he can dissect the quirks and pathologies that are running through our culture, probe the leavenings that have adumbrated modern societies racing towards the western horizon, with impressive acumen. However, I am not convinced that he is a first-rate characterizer, and this aspect of his wri...more Don DeLillo is a first-rate modern writer: his clipped and adamantine use of words, his compacted sentences and digitalized detail, all come together to tell his stories in a taut and invigorating manner—and he can dissect the quirks and pathologies that are running through our culture, probe the leavenings that have adumbrated modern societies racing towards the western horizon, with impressive acumen. However, I am not convinced that he is a first-rate characterizer, and this aspect of his writing is the main ballast that prevents Underworld from attaining the heights its ambition aims for. His characters are alive as they move from page to page, they impress themselves upon the reader in the moment, but I never get the sense of really knowing them, of getting what makes them tick, what drives them to make the curious choices that all DeLillo characters inevitably do. They are fleshed out with shielded circuitry; we are given access to their thought patterns but find too many blind alleys. It is not necessarily flawed for a writer to construct their fictional milieus in such a manner, but I felt it to be so for much of Underworld: while it made scant difference to the brilliance of certain set-pieces, such as the series of monologues from a fictionalized Lenny Bruce in the later-stages of the novel, it reduced Nick Shay to a mere performer, one whose childhood mysteries stand revealed as more of a joke than an abrasion; the highway killer to a caricature; and tempered the narrative with tacked-on characters like Shay's wife and her improbable lover.

The writing can be stunning, though: the opening prologue, a masterly mural of the infamous Shot Heard Around the World—the walk-off home run hit by the New York Giants' Bobby Thomson off the Brooklyn Dodger's Ralph Branca in 1951, a shot which clinched the National League pennant for the Giants and capped a dramatic clash between two Empire State titans—starts things rolling with authority. A young black Giants fan, Cotter Martin, catches the ball that Thomson drove over the fence; this souvenir will relive its historical role at points throughout the book as the mystery of what Martin actually did with it is revealed. Such deeply rooted and emotionally-charged pastimes as baseball prove to be one of the tethers that nuclear-armed America clings to—one of the traditions that drew our eyes away from the eschatological mummery of the Cold War. The omnipresent threat of the nuclear powers, the permanent state of non-war between them, forms one of Underworld's linchpins, along with Nick Shay's work in the waste-disposal business and the basically ephemeral and dispensable nature of postmodern America. The accumulated wastes of consumption and fear must be bundled up and eliminated so that society can keep itself focussed on the goal: work, buy, sell, die, all in the pursuit of that elusive chimera proclaimed happiness. The trash is growing exponentially, however, and disposal systems get backed up: the resulting strain produces tics, breakdowns and obsessions that cast a distracting pall over the entire performance.

Underworld falls short of greatness—as in his other books that I've read, there are diamonds and there is rust. The pitches were there, but he missed the opportunity to hit it out of the park a la the aforementioned Giant giant Thomson. Yet it held me through to the end, and its high points were towering. If, as I set the finished tome aside, the sum total of Nick Shay's story seemed less than compelling—if I already found several of its scenes slipping away to memory's waste bins—perhaps that is only fitting for a novel about the temporality of nigh everything today.(less)

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Gabi Dopazo It doesn’t fall short of greatness and I dont think such a scientific report about something as complex as Underground does any justice to this book o...more
Mar 31, 2012 01:48am

Ben Winch Just wanted to say I'm puzzled as to why people generally attribute so many of the apparent flaws of a work to authorial intention. In my own experien...more
Apr 20, 2012 04:50am

Mar 29, 2009 Joseph rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

An excellent example of the critical consensus being just plain wrong. Underworld is bloated, confused, and turgid - yet critics who should have known better drowned it in praise. I think this is due to a number of factors.

One, pedigree: DeLillo is a critical darling, deservedly so. Two, Heft: just like in movies, critics assume size equals importance, and thus the longer it takes to get through something, the more that something must have to say. It's 854 pages, 600 of which could have been cu...more

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Jan 02, 2008 Becca Becca rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mental-masturbation, modern-lit

I felt like this was one of those books where you kind of start getting drunk on the words and then you begin to think everything is super deep and has about 100 meanings and everything is interconnected. Then you start reading every sentence about 5 times and get lost in a daydream about how everything is related to waste, nuclear energy, more waste, and nuns.

When you finish the book you feel like you've gone on a journey but it's hard to talk about it and your not really sure exactly what hap...more

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Jul 20, 2008 Matt rated it 5 of 5 stars

The central metaphor in Underworld, as I saw it, revolves around trash. One of the main characters, Nick Shay, works for a waste-disposal company. No matter how many different recycling bins his family divides their waste into (seven and counting), it cannot all be reclaimed. The trash builds up – and what holds true for the physical also holds true for the personal and the historical. No matter how we might try to reprocess, recast,or ignore our history/memory, our past accumulates, and the wei...more

18 likes · like · see review

Apr 08, 2007 Lauren rated it 5 of 5 stars

People married, were born, and died in the time it took me to read this book. A kid sitting next to me on a plane commented "that's the fattest book I've ever seen. What's it about?" I told him "I have no idea--I'm only 580 pages into it." Having finished I still don't know what it was about but reading it was an extraordinary experience. The novella that introduces the book is perfect and complete in itself. What follows is discursive and ephemeral like some new kind of music. Reading it was li...more

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Mar 30, 2009 Saxon rated it 5 of 5 stars

Following a series of characters all loosely connected, DeLillo attempts to encompass and explore the entirety of modern(post?) America from the outer boroughs of NYC to the suburbs of Phoenix over a span of five decades. Beginning at a baseball game in 1951 at the events that took place there and elsewhere in the world that day, Underworld embarks on an exhaustive depiction of events and facets that characterize America (baseball, suburbs, Cuban Missle Crisis, etc) and its effect on the America...more Following a series of characters all loosely connected, DeLillo attempts to encompass and explore the entirety of modern(post?) America from the outer boroughs of NYC to the suburbs of Phoenix over a span of five decades. Beginning at a baseball game in 1951 at the events that took place there and elsewhere in the world that day, Underworld embarks on an exhaustive depiction of events and facets that characterize America (baseball, suburbs, Cuban Missle Crisis, etc) and its effect on the American psyche through intimate stories revolving around everyone from a waste contractor to Lenny Bruce.

Overwhelming? Hardly. This is a collage of post-modern life that is filled with symbols and coincidences that we want to assign meaning, when in actuality, much like our own daily experiences, any meaning is shrouded, hidden and quite possibly doesn't even exist. Many of the characters of Underworld find themselves caught in this impasse, wanting to find a truth out in the physical world, but ultimately failing to ever do so. Sound familiar? Yeah, DeLillo might describing your life. (Ironically, and actually quite impressively, it seems after reading reviews of this book from people who did not like it, that they might have been struggling with the same dilemma while reading the book.) If it all seems a little too over-intellectual, it really isn't. DeLillo just seems to have an acute sense of what its like to live in America from the 1950's onward.

Maybe this is going out on a limb, but I feel like this book can also be read as a collection of short stories revolving around similar themes. Its big, messy and sure, maybe could have been edited a bit, but in the end its a satisfying read that moves quite quickly. (If I hadn't moved across the country by car half way through this book, I probably would have gotten through it quicker myself.)

Okay, no more books this year that are 600 + pages. This is my fourth (fifth?) since June (my Goodreads years start in June to coincide with when I started this list). (less)

4 likes · like · see review

Apr 06, 2008 Hamish rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: lit

I totally fail to see what makes Don DeLillo such a great writer and why people are all over this novel. It's that obnoxious Pynchon/Wallace type of post-modern fiction where all the emphasis is placed on novelty and not enough on the fundamentals of good writing. The prose is mediocre, the dialogue is wooden and the characterization is TERRIBLE. 800 effing pages and I still have no clue who any of these characters are, none of them have even the slightest sense of realness. But the plots intert...more

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Mar 01, 2007 joyce rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Underworld, at 200-some pages in, I'm gonna have to get all Robert Plant and put you down for a little while. Not because I can't quit you, but because a) I'm not into baseball, b) the Cold War has no visceral appeal to me and c) neither does postmodernity. Seems to me a far bigger punch could have been delivered in far fewer pages, despite the fact that your prose and dialogue are lovely and I would give a limb to be able to write half that well. So I'm sorry, Underworld. We can still be friend...more

2 likes · like · see review

Jun 23, 2012 Stephen Wallant rated it 5 of 5 stars

Underworld, by Don Delillo. Man. When I read this book in the 90s, I thought it was great. Bobby Thomson's shot heard round the world, the Zapruder film, bombheads, downwinders, the 20th century. 1996! Or whenever. Also, it had the rat pack's secret underground lair. I hadn't really thought about them then, and I don't really think about it now, but what a feeling. People's teeth turning to dust! Now, this book is soooo long, but you get really really into it.

When I was selling knives in college...more

1 like · like · see review

Feb 22, 2010 trivialchemy rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: abandoned

I tried so hard. But I just can't. Fucking. Do it.

I submit this final plea to the goodreads universe. Give me a reason to keep going, or on page 381 shall I forever lie.

11 likes · like · see review

Sep 13, 2011 Vivian Valvano rated it 5 of 5 stars

I read this a few years ago and was blown away. (I taught WHITE NOISE, but never this.) A few weeks ago, Michiko Kakutani in the TIMES declared a re-reading of UNDERWORLD to be imperative on her "bucket list" of things to do before summer flies away from us all. I decided to follow her advice. So, on a second reading, my evaluation can be summed up in the same single word that I thought of the first time: BRILLIANT. Now that I'm writing on Goodreads, I'll add: this is one of the most important,...more

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Jun 14, 2008 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: George Bradford

I found this a stunning book, a reminder of what good writing can be.
I was reading this book in September 2001, when I put it down to go on vacation in Switzerland. While on vacation, 9-11 happened. When I returned, I picked the book up again and the cover - which prominently featured a creepy, black and white picture of the World Trade Center taken from the cemetery at Trinity Church - had a new meaning for me.
It was such a wonderful, sweeping, poetic book that it's hard to encapsulate. Someh...more

5 likes · like · see review

Jul 06, 2007 Ted rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: american-literature

A great big book about baseball, trash and the Cold War.
Underworld has an interesting structure, going backwards for the most part. The 60 page prologue is the best part of the book, brilliant prose about the Giants' triumph over the Dodgers at home at the Polo Grounds on the last day of the 1951 penant race, Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard Round the World, linking Cotter Martin, a young black boy from Harlem who jumps the gate and nabs the home run, J. Edgar Hoover, who hears about a Russian atomic...more

2 likes · like · see review

Aug 01, 2007 Kait rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

After much consternation, I think I don't like this book very much. It was bloated and very hard to follow without delivering on the narrative greatness that its absolutely stunning prose promises.

If I were you (unless you are gaga for DeLillo and don't mind if things don't really come to a satisfying culmination), read Pafko at the Wall instead. It's the first 60 pages of this book and it is some of the best writing you will ever read. Though Underworld has a few lovely moments and some reall...more

1 like · like · see review

Dec 11, 2008 Patrick added it · review of another edition Recommends it for: paranoiacs

Things I remember from this book:
-Honeymooners
-the baseball
-Lenny Bruce
-J. Edgar Hoover & friend
-recycling
-airport graveyard and plane ride
-stupid pretentious black paper chapters.
-That's about it.

Is that bad? Well, I did read it quite a while ago. But I don't remember enjoying it as much as Pynchon's "V," which I read at about the same time for class. It was a very dead book, sytlistically and in content. Delillo writes dead. His books do not live. He does this purposefully, but as an expre...more

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Aug 12, 2012 Betsy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

As the book begins, street urchins band together to jump the turnstiles into the Polo Grounds, celebrities get ready for the opening pitch, and before you know it you're witnessing Bobby Thomson's "shot heard round the world," one of the most celebrated moments in baseball history. The ball that he hit becomes a very tangible metaphor as we follow it through the book.

DeLillo is such a great writer that he makes the story flow as if it were unfolding before our eyes. There are various subplots,...more

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Jul 06, 2012 míol mór rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: finished, on, dec, 30, 2009, anglo-america, new, york, postmodernism, italo-america, 900, jesuits

Links

"The Power of History" (collateral essay by Don DeLillo):
http://nyti.ms/dzdDSV

The Rapture. Oct. 28, 1992:
http://bit.ly/hygVb3

Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Triumph of Death:
http://bit.ly/7b4bCS
Pieter Bruegel the Elder Children's Games:
http://bit.ly/9sPHnh
James McNeill Whistler
Arrangement in Gray and Black. The Artist's Mother:
http://bit.ly/amv9MH

Russ Hodges chronicles The Shot Heard 'Round the World:
http://bit.ly/3XeeIm
http://bit.ly/bQKGQa

The Zapruder film:
http://bit.ly/a45Rzg
http://bit.l ...more

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Jan 14, 2012 christa rated it 5 of 5 stars

“Underworld” was published when I was in college, a part time bookseller who touched so many books in the course of a day, shelving new fiction, shelving classics, shelving How-To manuals and graphic novels and dictionaries. “Underworld” was something else, much buzzed about, a grey image of the World Trade Center buildings bisected with a church steeple. I directed many-a customer to its spot in the store and set it into hands. That’s one of the rules of bookselling: Make the customer hold the...more “Underworld” was published when I was in college, a part time bookseller who touched so many books in the course of a day, shelving new fiction, shelving classics, shelving How-To manuals and graphic novels and dictionaries. “Underworld” was something else, much buzzed about, a grey image of the World Trade Center buildings bisected with a church steeple. I directed many-a customer to its spot in the store and set it into hands. That’s one of the rules of bookselling: Make the customer hold the book.

By the time it came out in Trade Paper, I was a frothy mess of curiosity. I had to read it. I dug in. The prologue is about 60 pages of the Giants v. the Dodgers, Branca v. Thompson. The shot heard around the world. A young kid skips school to jump a turnstile and watch the game. It is expertly drawn from different perspectives: This kid, Cotter, who loves baseball. The response of the crowd, littering the outfield with strips of paper, receipts, pieces of magazines, debris. J. Edgar Hoover as part of a foursome that includes Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra and Toots Shor. The buildup to the key moment in New York City baseball history and the way Cotter eventually oozes through the crowd for the game-winning baseball, giving a man a snake bite to relinquish his grip, Jackie Gleason barfing up hot dogs and drinks and the splatters landing in the cuffs of Sinatra’s pants.

This scene is famous, well, as famous as a scene from a book can be. It has been republished in Best Sports Writing of the Century, among a handful of other places where I have stumbled upon it. It’s great. It is detailed. It is exciting and funny and super visual. But it is the reason I’ve spent the past decade and a half failing to read this book.

Step One: Begin reading “Underworld,” including it’s massive prologue. Step Two: Continue reading into the introduction of garbage administrator Nick Shay, his suspicions about his wife’s infidelity, his handful of big-drinking work friends, a reconnection with the artist Klara Sax he banged when he was a teenager. Step Three: Feel the weight of this book, all 800 plus pages and these vignettes that are getting introductory treatment. Feel mind wander. Step Four: Set down “Underworld” just a few too many days in a row. Until the book opens automatically to the place where it has been left sprawled face down. Step Five: Retain curiosity about the book, read others by Don Delillo. Step Six: Resolve to read “Underworld,” but come to resent the prologue, THE PROLOGUE, so long, so baseball, read so many times you could one-act play it at an after bar probably. But know that you cannot read “Underworld” without revisiting that prologue. It’s part of the book and it’s necessary. Step Seven: Think about how much you want to read “Underworld,” but just don’t.

At exactly 1 p.m. Central Time on January 14, 2012, I finished “Underworld.” It took two weeks. It took re-reading the prologue (again) but reading it in a new way. It was interesting again. Mind blowing in its attention to detail. Delillo painting mini figurines that require a magnifying glass to shade the laugh lines with his Lilliputian brush.

It spans about four decades in America, starting with the famous baseball game, then jumping between periods. At its center is Nick Shay, who now believes he owns the game-winning ball, though who can know for sure. He keeps it as a memento of failure, since his team lost that day and forever erased his interest in baseball. Shay has a muddied past. He grew up in an Italian neighborhood in NYC and his life took a seedy lean where people steal and connive and cruise around in a stolen car. There are hints that despite his relatively normal life as a middle aged man, he once killed a man. He also once got hot and heavy with the wife of his brother’s chess coach. These bits of bio are dropped, little nuggets, and the stories are brought back into play in a measured way as the story progresses.

There are whole chunks on Shay’s brother, a former chess whiz, who struggles socially. The artist Klara Sax, who spends a summer struggling to find a reason to paint, a mysterious young girl who forages through garbage cans and lives on the street, an expert graffiti artist who stains the subways with his wildstyle creations. J Edgar Hoover attends Truman Capote’s party, but first spends time with his assistant and chaste romantic interest, a nun, Cotter’s wheelin’ and dealin’ for a dime father.

This book is insanely imagined. Who the heck is Don Delillo and can I get a copy of his brain scan? How did he do this? He weaves fact and fiction, binds it so tightly, that the seams aren’t even visible. Consider a section in which Klara Sax goes to see lost film footage by the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Delillo actually describes this footage in pretty great detail, staying true to the filmmaker and what kind of lost footage he might have collected at this period in his life. In the same book, Delillo successfully gets into the head of a graffiti artist, the best around, walking the walk, talking the talk and embracing the lingo and the fears and the moment of pride when a train he has painted emerges from a tunnel.

I’ve said before that this or that book is about “everything” and now I fear that I’ve wasted that descriptor on things that weren’t about “everything” compared to the way “Underworld” is about everything. So, fresh slate. “Underworld” is now the official about everything book. And, nearly 15 years after I first tried to read it, I’m going to make my grand claim that this is the best book I’ve ever read. (less)

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Dec 10, 2011 Ensiform rated it 4 of 5 stars

An 817-page novel, a tome on the last half century, on the cold war and waste disposal and how lives are connected in subtle ways, told backwards for the most part. I found it hard to appreciate some passages: the characters for the most part share the same heavy-handed angst-ridden viewpoint, with little differentiation between characters’ outlooks. And certainly the novel could have been shortened a bit. But the writing is sharp, the prose sure, the descriptions poetic and the observations wit...more

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Jan 14, 2009 Holly rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

(3.5/5) DeLillo is obviously an excellent writer, but this book was a bit too epic, too long, too many characters. Much of it would make excellent short story material, and I have to admit that it was fun when correlations fell into place (e.g. at one point the owner of the infamous baseball, Chuckie flew in the bombers that Klara ended up painting; Hoover's garbage was searched; the change minus the dollar price of the ball was thirteen, etc). I also appreciate modern writers' ability to flex t...more

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Apr 16, 2013 Robert Wechsler rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-lit

This is the work of a master, but DeLillo is still not my kind of master. Fortunately, he seems to have grown out of much of his fascination with things mysterious and pretentious. And his writing, sentence by sentence, is very fine. He has control of his phrasing, rhythm, et al. But 210 pages into this 825-page novel, I had had enough. My respect for his writing was not enough to get me through what is, with DeLilloesque twists and touches, basically a straightforward character-study novel that...more

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Mar 17, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

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.

Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omnisci...more 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.

Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. 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. 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. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. 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 all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.(less)

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Feb 20, 2013 Jeremiah rated it 4 of 5 stars

I feel like I have to defend my reading level before giving Underworld anything less than five stars. The prologue is one of the best things ever, and the portion immediately following, featuring Klara Sax, Nick Shay, and Long Tall Sally, is also very good. From there on, I found myself less and less interested, but nevertheless moving along because -- yes, yes!-- DeLillo is on to something big.

DeLillo thinks of shared experiences the way Lawrence Weschler looks at pictures, and I really apprec...more I feel like I have to defend my reading level before giving Underworld anything less than five stars. The prologue is one of the best things ever, and the portion immediately following, featuring Klara Sax, Nick Shay, and Long Tall Sally, is also very good. From there on, I found myself less and less interested, but nevertheless moving along because -- yes, yes!-- DeLillo is on to something big.

DeLillo thinks of shared experiences the way Lawrence Weschler looks at pictures, and I really appreciate that about his writing. I think Mao II is a better example of this on the whole; Underworld is too big, tries to tie together too many things. Maybe it actually does, but by that time who is paying attention? "Admit it, you're bored," says one character, who appears in the middle and whose purpose seems to be only to say these words. It seems like you need to read this book strategically, rather than to just read it. Maybe the best way is to read two parts, put it down, then double back before reading the next part. And maybe, in a book that deals so much with the past, with collective memory, maybe that's the point. I guess I'm trying to say that I'm not willing to reduce the importance of any section of the book, but it is a damn challenge to pay attention.

I also think DeLillo is very good at writing. I've seen complaints about his writing, quips about it ("DeLillo loves the way he writes") but this only becomes a problem for me on a macro level, not sentence by sentence. I love his sentences. I do not love how many there are in this book.

This book is too many: too many sentences; too many characters who are too astute in their own observations, too hyperaware of why they do the things they do, too many who are nothing but callous toward each other.

This book is too much, and I lost the thread -- but was that the point? I love when through the experience of reading a book, the mere act of it, you are left with the feeling, both visceral and metaphorical, of the themes it tries to convey. Reaching back through the memories and muck of the past -- tell me this book didn't make you crazy trying to do that within its two covers. In that sense the form matches the function.

But perhaps it's just self-indulgent.

The nice thing is that I can see going back to Underworld in the future, opening up to a random section, and really giving that section the attention it might deserve.(less)

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Dec 17, 2012 Ian Mapp rated it 2 of 5 stars

826 Pages of varying quality. All in all, far too long, subplots go nowhere, the books purpose is unclear and you are desperate for it to end so that you can get on with something interesting.

Which is a shame, as it has a stunning opening - an opening that you must think is the only thing that all the critics on the front of the book read, as the rest is rubbish.

It starts in a very cinematic way, with a technique of hyper omni presence, as a classic ball game ensues. A champioship is won on the...more

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Nov 13, 2012 David Blinn added it

Partway through reading Underworld, I mentioned the book to a friend and she asked what it was about. I didn't give a very good answer at the time, and after having finished it, I'm still not sure I can. The blurb on the back of the book gives some jive about a great aching love story between Nick Shay and Klara Sax painted across the landscape of the Cold War. That story is present to some degree, but Nick and Klara are only very dubiously the protagonists, and it is far from the bewitching rom...more Partway through reading Underworld, I mentioned the book to a friend and she asked what it was about. I didn't give a very good answer at the time, and after having finished it, I'm still not sure I can. The blurb on the back of the book gives some jive about a great aching love story between Nick Shay and Klara Sax painted across the landscape of the Cold War. That story is present to some degree, but Nick and Klara are only very dubiously the protagonists, and it is far from the bewitching romance the back of the book would have you believe. Many of the notes of praise on the inside mention the importance of the Cold War setting, and while the Cold War is certainly thematically important and serves as more than just the setting, I wouldn't say it is a book about the Cold War any more than I would say that it is a book about garbage and waste disposal, which also feature prominently in the novel and were mentioned not at all in any of the book's included publicity material.

The most insightful piece in the included promotional material mentioned that Underworld is a book that teaches you how to read it as you go along. I didn't really understand this comment until I got to the very last couple pages, but now I think it makes sense. This is not to imply that the ending is some tremendous revelation or surprise twist - far from it, the ending arrives in unbroken continuity with what came before it.

This was the first book by Don DeLillo that I have read, and for the most part I found it very moving. Its enormous scope and sprawling settings and cast of characters reminded me of Tolstoy's War and Peace. While not as long as War and Peace or nearly as didactic, it tackles the totality of life during a certain period of time with similar intensity. The issues, are of course, those of America from the early 1950's until the mid-1990's rather than mid-18th century Russian. It is less concerned with the historical and more with the quotidian, and it is certainly not as overtly didactic. But just as General Kutuzov and Tsar Alexander are important characters in War and Peace, so are J Edgar Hoover and Lenny Bruce to Underworld. Where Tolstoy is warm and loving to his characters, DeLillo is cooler to his. He never takes their side or even tries to judge them. He just gives their story. But how he does it! There is something mesmerizing about DeLillo's language in Underworld. I'm not sure if it is musical or poetic or both or neither, but every word seems to belong and transport you there so that you live the novel right alongside the characters. It's a deep and rare suspension of disbelief. This doesn't make Underworld an easy book to read. In fact, it's exhausting and takes some stamina to reach from beginning to end.

The book opens at a baseball game, or rather, THE baseball game, in 1951 when the Giants played the Dodgers for the right to go to the world series and Bobby Thompson hit the Shot Heard Round the World. Frank Sinatra is at the game with Jackie Gleason, and so is a young boy from Harlem named Cotter Martin who skips school and jumps the turnstile to get in. Russ Hodges is in the radio booth and you hear his famous words. FBI director J Edgar Hoover is at the game too, studying Bruegel in Life magazine and receiving reports of Soviet atomic tests. Cotter catches Thompson's home run ball and the ball and its meaning and history echo through the remaining pages.

Reading those opening pages and the ones that followed, it struck me then as it strikes me now how the lives and events of Underworld are so much like my life, and our current events. Not that it is an exact mirror, but rather it's a reflection that confirms the old saying "the more things change the more they stay the same." As I was reading about Bobby Thompson's Shot, the Giants (now in San Francisco and not in New York) were once again in the playoffs, once again on their way to playing in the World Series. Reading about Nick Shay heading about uptown, back to his old digs where he grew up when the lights go out in New York City during the great blackout of 1965, I thought about my own time when the lights went out in New York and I went uptown and walked all the way up through the top of Manhattan, through the Bronx, and out to Westchester where I lived during the great blackout of 2003. And even as I continued reading the lights went out again through much of New York as Superstorm Sandy ripped through. I was living and repeating the book, experiencing and managing its consequences even as I read it.

The book teaches you how to read it. Yes, it's true. I should have seen it from the first line: "He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful."(less)

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Nov 10, 2012 Lucas rated it 5 of 5 stars

"He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful." Worth getting through to the end, no matter what opinions you've read. What appears daunting and impossible to keep up with at the beginning morphs into a very readable, dramatic, bizarre, and deep book with so many interesting threads running through it I have a hard time knowing where to start. But it's not just a rambling, dry literary text that complex for the sake of complexity. Other DeLillo books m...more

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About Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo is an American author best known for his novels, which paint detailed portraits of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He currently lives outside of New York City.

Among the most influential American writers of the past decades, DeLillo has received, among author awards, a National Book Award (White Noise, 1985), a PEN/Faulkner Award (Mao II, 1991), and an American...more

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“Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.” — 75 people liked it

“Longing on a large scale makes history.” — 14 people liked it

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