Underworld

My very favorite DeLillo novel even though I don't like baseball. I love the way he creates a binding thread of things to join all his characters together. The cover photograph of the World Trade towers is spooky...

This sprawling confusing piece of art is possibly the greatest story that I've ever read. It's actually collection of stories all circling around the many ideas of what it means to be alive during the Cold war. What it means to be young, old, or anywhere in between and feel that kind of inevitable dread surrounded by tiny pieces of joy that exists in the simplest parts of life. Your job, baseball, sex, good sex, and arts are all things that you can use to take away from the fear that is The Bomb. At the end of the day though, life goes on, you see the 90's and you see garbage is still a thing, baseball is still a thing, and believe it or not America is too. You will have to decide for yourself if that's worth it.
May Angeles fallow you wherever you go!

Ik kan tamelijk kort zijn over dit boek: ik hield er gewoon niet van. Neem nu de proloog: 60 bladzijden van verbale acrobatie over een baseball-wedstrijd uit 1951 die veertig jaar na datum nog altijd tot de verbeelding spreekt. Ok, DeLillo haalt literair werkelijk alles uit de kast om hetzelfde effect te bereiken als een vinnige, doorgemonteerde openingssc?ne in een film die een uurlang op je netvlies blijft trillen; maar net dat mag je niet doen met proza, vind ik; laat elk medium toch gewoon zijn eigen sterkte houden. En dan dat clich? om in te zoomen op cultfiguren als Frank Sinatra of J. Edgar Hoover die ook in het stadion waren en die allerlei bespiegelingen over de Koude Oorlog ten beste geven.Wat volgt, is een meanderende, caleidoscopische roman waarin zowel de baseball-wedstrijd als de Koude Oorlog de verbindende thema?s zijn: het is zo gezocht, zo artificieel, dat het lijkt alsof DeLillo zegt: ?Kijk eens wat ik allemaal kan te voorschijn toveren, hoe ingenieus ik de dingen kan maken?? en daarbij vergeet dat het ook nog ergens over mag gaan. Neen, dit boek is echt niet aan mij besteed.

One of those books that is intelligent and well-written and has a lot to say, but is actually also really boring. I think I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I will never be a Don DeLillo fan.

I could not finish this book. I struggled for 3 weeks and still only got to page 500 (out of 827). I guess it didn't help that baseball bores me to tears. My main problem with the book is its nonlinear "plot." I'm just not a fan of this writing style. Still, I recognize that there were passages that were simply brilliant. Three members of my book club raved about it. The rest of us didn't care for it at all.

It is not so much about baseball. It is the three dimensions of visual writing. This book is technicolor in your mind.

I persisted for about 300 pages but could not bring myself to finish this pretentious book. Life is too short to read crap.

One of my favorite novels.

Starts with a famous, magical night at the baseball and never quite regains that spark. A poorer cousin to Infinite Jest, in my humble opinion.

There is an important reason why Underworld is written from future to past. The artist in the desert, painting a deactivated aircraft from the cold war times, is trying to process the past from a nation that is lost to time. Such an understanding must arise from the creation of meaning to fill in the gaps, as she does with the pin-up girl left as a souvenir in the B-52. What she tries to process is as much the story of a nation in the uncertain limbo between the ending of an era and the start of a new one, where things just do not seem real, as she remarks, as it is about herself, and a past that cannot be recalled, even if it made her as she is today, as well as the man who comes searching for it in her in 1992.

History can only be understood by walking backwards in time. What explains each scar is a story that is not told upright, but hidden in between every line. Underworld follows DeLillo's usual tropes of dialogue, where everything that's important is everything that is not mentioned. It's just not possible to understand the paranoia of nuclear threat, you have to live under it. Yet this is what we try, to make sense of everything that's happening. This is why the story is told backwards: the reason behind every event lies in something happening just before that. Underworld is a story about a nation just how it is about each one of its inhabitants.

That's why I find this book so incredibly dense and hard to read. Every part has enough content to be a standalone book, but every line is meaningless if not attached to a before and after. Such complex relationships are multisided, revealing something that does not concern only those immediately involved. That's why Nick Shay is allowed to hold the ball from the shot heard round the world, and to claim it is a symbol of defeat.

Disclaimer: It is entirely possible I did not understand this book at all and what follows is meaningless babble.

Of all the books I have ever read I believe Underworld might be the hardest to review. Not because of the star rating. That is a 5 without question. The writing here is dazzling. This is historical fiction deconstructed, reconstructed, and then thrown into a supercharged industrial blender and shot out into the cosmos. Our “hero” works in “waste management” and a recurring theme here is the creative ways we prettify the fact of our waste products, from actual shit to plutonium waste, helping us to ignore the fact that all this waste, submerged or made into building materials or buried, or whatever, is destroying the planet. The parallel between the way in which DeLillo treats historical fiction (and the way he treats history for that matter) and the waste management sleight of hand is a terrifying yet fun way to render evil genius. He turns the metaphors used by marketers to make the most pernicious toxic things seem like gifts to the world into a metaphor for humans creating a glossy version of the past and future they can live with. He uses a central metaphor as a second central metaphor. It is breathtaking.

DeLillo seems to repudiate nostalgia here (a concept I wholeheartedly embrace.) The past is special because we want it to be special. We create false memories and expunge anything problematic. The value of memory is no more than mass delusion. “Every memory we have is, finally, of ourselves. If the memory of an experience is flawed, there is a rift in the continuity of self.” We are fiddling with the past, creating a good-ol-days myth in order to get a hit of dopamine and forget we are inexorably moving toward an end we ourselves have ordained. The past is filled with as much or more evil than the present but people agree to apply and validate the nostalgia filter because mass delusion gives us succor and hope in a harsh and hopeless world. That nostalgia filter is no different from the delusions of people who see statues of the Virgin Mary weep or the face of Jesus in a water stain on a building, just a delusion born of privilege rather than want.

Despite Underworld's brilliance as a whole, and maybe because there is no plot (as there is no plot in life) sometimes the whole thing seems to kind of fall apart. There are lulls – long lulls that left me pretty disconnected from the rest of the story. But, though it wanders off frequently, the book comes charging back every time to this concept of life and memory as a euphemism, like Glenn Close popping up spring-loaded in Michael Douglas’ tub. When I was poking around trying to pump myself up to read this book, I came across a quote from Martin Amis’ review of this book that really sums things up: “Underworld may or may not be a great novel, but there is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great novelist.” Those lulls are problematic, but they are the packaging for utter brilliance.

Lenny Bruce comes up a lot in this book. He is not simply mentioned. DeLillo recreates several Bruce performances while tunneling into Bruce’s brilliant, tragic, overfilled head. While this is well done I started wondering a bit past the halfway point why Don kept doing this and why he kept focusing on the way Bruce ping-ponged between funny traditionally structured bawdy insightful jokes and profound, decidedly unfunny, observations about human cruelty and idiocy and brilliance, and the inevitability that those things will drive us to destroy ourselves (Bruce’s tagline, “we’re all gonna diiiiiiiiiiiiie,” is the chorus here.) At first it was easy to connect Bruce’s routines to the specter of nuclear annihilation. After wondering about that for a while I realized that DeLillo had coopted Bruce’s structure for this book. He intersperses incredibly funny and traditionally structured scenes with profound, decidedly unfunny observations about human cruelty and idiocy, and brilliance, and the inevitability that those things will drive us to destroy ourselves. I think DeLillo uses some of the lulls the same way as the humor. All of it wraps up profound truth, Delillo is a modern-day Lenny who understands you can't keep an audience with a spare recitation of terrifying truth.

A couple of random notes on things that really impressed me. First, while parts of this book are firmly rooted in the language and thought processes of the 60’s. 70’s and 80’s DeLillo was disturbingly prescient, and much of this feels very current. He saw the danger of things that have now come to roost but which when this was written most just saw as progress. Second, the book launches with what could easily have been published as a free-standing novella set at one of the most famous baseball game moments ever (Bobby Thomson’s walk-off home run in the 1951 National League Dodgers- Giants pennant game a/k/a “the shot heard round the world.”) This opening novella stands as one of the finest pieces of writing I have ever read. Even if you decide not to invest in this giant book, 827 pages that require complete mental focus pretty much all the time, you should read the first part. You should bear in mind though that the epilogue is a response of sorts to that opening bit of nostalgia. The ending also, it gives us some closure on the baseball which is hit in the opening and sails through these pages. Never has a baseball worked this hard, but though dinged up it manages to knit the book together.

I will shut up now and hope at least a couple of people will be inspired to take on this boulder of a book.

*This book weighs about 10 pounds. It is not totable so I got the audio to listen to on the subway, and I read the hardcover at home. The audio was enjoyable so I don't not recommend it, but this is a book you want to read in print. When I listened on the train and got home and picked up the book it felt like I had never seen/heard the portions I listened too. I couldn't figure out where I was. Nearly every time I listened I ended up going back and reading the text.

Reason read: 1001 Books, 2nd Quarter read, Reading 1001. ROOT (read our own tomes). The story is historical fiction, a postmodern novel that is set in the period of the fifties and sixties. The book opens with the baseball pennant race of 1951. What's not more American than baseball. Themes include; nuclear proliferation, waste, and everything else that epitomizes the 50s and 60s. DeLillo weaves the reality with the fiction throughout the book.

The novel was published in 1997 and received a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize and won the American Book Award. It is set in the US states of New York, Nevada, Arizona, Texas and perhaps others I haven't gotten to yet. I will add that Minnesota was also mentioned as Nick spent his juvenile detention years in northeast Minnesota (my home town area). Also mentioned is Kazakhstan which is interesting fact because I just bought Soveitistan by Erika Fatland which covers all the 'stans'. It mentions that nuclear testing occurred here. And it mentions that people die young and die of cancer.

The book probably is his best but I like Libra better, the difference might be the sprawling length of Underworld. Libra focuses only on Kennedy assassination while this book focuses on everything. I liked that it starts with the baseball game and the missing home run ball is the piece that connects the many people and points of the novel.
Rating 3.9 stars

reveries for future garbage.

Voltaire is best known today for a novella and being a bit of a prick (in an enlightening way), but he also wrote a number of epic poems, including the first (?) epic poem in French, the Henriade. This was reprinted dozens of times during his life. The epic was the great literary genre of the eighteenth century, in theory. Now, of course, nobody gives a shit, because that stuff is utterly unreadable. Our 'epics' are long novels, and, like the Henriade, they get laurels aplenty, despite being all too often unreadable. Authors continue to churn them out, because critics adore a behemoth.

Sometimes, it's best to just admit defeat. There are a few things worth critically adoring in Underworld:

i) The fact that DeLillo was ballsy enough to tell the story backwards.
ii) Any scene with the nuns and priests in it.
iii) A few patented DeLillo symbol-objects, here, the painted planes in the desert and the giant ship carrying garbage/heroin/nuclear waste/who knows what.

These are undermined, though, by, e.g.,

ia) The fact that he doesn't have any story to tell, so telling it backwards adds nothing.
iia) There are too few scenes with the nuns, and too many with the very boring Nick Shay. How many men who've blown off another man's head with a shotgun (accidentally, but still), and had an affair with a super-hot modern artist who attracts disciples like black clothes attract dog hair, could be *this* boring? Only one, Nick Shay, and Delillo writes about him for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages.
iiia) Those symbol-objects can carry books the length of, say, White Noise. This book is 827 pages long. Not even the painted planes in the desert can carry a book for that long.

So we're breaking even (I'm being generous). How about the ideas?

By far the most intelligent, and humorous, scene in the book comes in chapter 3 of part 4. We get to watch people watch an apocryphal Eisenstein film, called 'Underworld.' Some characters' reactions:

a) "The plot was hard to follow. There was no plot. Just loneliness."
b) Esther said, "I want to be rewarded for this ordeal."
c) "Admit it, you're bored."
d) "It was remote and fragmentary and made on the cheap, supposedly personal, and it had a kind of suspense even as it crawled along. How and when would it reveal itself?"
e) "What about the politics? She thought this film might be a protest against socialist realism... what was this murky film, this strange dark draggy set of images if not a statement of outrage and independence?"
f) "Do we have to stay for the rest of it?" "I want to see what happens." "What could happen?"
g) "The camp elements of the program... now tended to resemble sneak attacks on the dominant culture."
h) "All Eisenstein wants you to see, in the end, are the contradictions of being."

This is transparently about the novel, *Underworld*. There is no plot, it is an ordeal, it is boring, it is remote and fragmentary, you do kind of want to know if/when it will reveal itself or something will happen, it could easily be nothing more than a statement about the supposed 'contradictions of being'. And you can, if you like, read all of that as a giant protest against realism.

So, given that our author is aware of the book's flaws (you can protest against realism and be entertaining, by the way),how can we justify its existence? In its intellectual content? That content is ambiguous, in a good way: DeLillo asks us to consider the relationship between nostalgia (for, e.g., baseball) and history (i.e., things that will matter to mentally sound people who didn't live through them). It would be nice to think that this book treats reverence for baseball and various other, even more cheesy, mass cultural ways of extracting money from people ironically: of course it's fun to go watch baseball, but it's not particularly important.

I fear, however, there is no irony, and that Underworld is just a depressing, postmodern affirmation of 'everyday life,' that looks back with longing (somewhat paradoxically, given the aforementioned pomoness) to the Cold War, back when the Giants and Dodgers were still New York teams. I fear that Underworld's main point is to show how Capital-H History disposes of all the glorious little knick-knacks we nostalgize about, like, say, baseballs, and how we have to hang onto them and make sure we get to stay individuals and live authentically even though The Man doesn't want us to. Consider that the most memorable scene in the book, according to the internet I read, is when the priest tells Nick 'Boring' Shay that he's tired of educating teenagers in "abstract ideas" and would be better off educating them as to the names of particular concrete things like, e.g., the names of shoe-parts, which he then proceeds to name for a few pages. How poetic it is that he knows what to call the cuff, counter and vamp. What a lesson in "the depth and reach of the commonplace".

If a book is going to argue for the depth and reach and importance of the quotidian, and eschew any attempt to connect its various chunks, those chunks had better be glorious. That is not the case here. I just don't care about the moments that DeLillo chooses not to connect to each other.

Now, of course, that wouldn't matter too much if the writing was good, but, as other reviewers have cataloged, it is not. Who let the following phrase slop into existence? Because it couldn't have been Don DeLillo: "Matt drove west, deeper into the white parts of the map, where he would try to find a clue to his future." I'd love to say I've made it look worse, but the preceding clause involves the phrase 'soft dawn.'

Underworld is not funny, as some DeLillo books are. It is not as well written as many of them are. It is not intellectually interesting as a couple of them are. It neither asks, nor answers, important questions, as DeLillo is capable of doing. It is, however, long; it is ambitious; and it was published before everything in the U.S.A. went to poop thanks to financial speculation, war and incompetence. So people call it a Great American Novel, and pine for the time before Osama, Bush and the Great Recession, just like they pine for the good ol' days in the ballpark.

It is the Henriade of a very talented man, not his Candide.

An excellent book, it was quite different than what I expected. I enjoyed the reverse chronological structure of the story and the characters were believable and it was interesting to see how they unmatured through the telling of the book. This is the first DeLillo novel I’ve read and definitely would be interested to read some of his other books. My only negative feedback is this book could probably have been shortened quite a bit and still kept its significance.

Read the first 100 pages and quit. Didn't catch.

While I didn't have any trouble reading it, the structure of the book didn't really work for me (jumping back and forth in time & between characters) and I ended up with a feeling of "so what was the point of all that?" I never really became engaged with any of the characters and the connection between some of them seemed extremely thin. Oh well...

Don DeLillo's "Underworld" is a very modern novel. The thing is, I despise modern novels. I have no interest in baseball. I couldn't even remember the character's names partway through this.... I just found it so very dull. I didn't care what happened to the baseball, who got killed and why or about Marian and her husband's martial troubles.

I know this novel has received heaps of acclaim and praise... so I'm sure it's wonderful if you're into these types of books, but this one definitely wasn't for me.

“I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else's body in the photograph that's introduced as evidence. I didn't believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real.”

Underworld opens breathlessly with one of the longest and most exhilarating prologues that I have read in a long time and features a famous baseball game played in New York in 1951 - the Giants versus the Dodgers. This was a key play-off game, won with a home run in the last moment of the final innings. DeLillo wonderfully captures the emotions of all those that were present,the spectators, the cops and vendors, the commentators, and a few notable celebrity guests namely Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and J. Edgar Hoover, among others. Also in the crowd is a young black lad wagging school and who manages to get in to see the game for free. This lad ultimately leaves the ground with the actual baseball that sailed into the crowd for the winning run. This ball, its owners and their fates, is used to guide the reader through the remainder of the story that follows. Although I am a sports fan I cannot truly say that I'm a baseball fan but I have got to admit that I was totally swept along on the wave of emotions in this section.

The novel's central character is Nick Shay, who will come to own the baseball was not actually at the game but rather he was on the roof of his home listening to the game on the radio. Other narratives belonging to those he knows, family and acquaintances, also feature heavily in this book. Nick grows up in the Bronx mainly with his mother and brother after his father, a small-time bookie, one night walks out of their lives never to be seen again. Nick's adolescence is troubled and aged 17 is sentenced to three years in a juvenile correctional facility for shooting a man. However, once there he settles down, gains an education before marrying,having kids and on the face of it leads a pretty normal middle-class life as an executive of a waste-recycling firm living in Phoenix, Arizona travelling a good deal for business purposes.

Following the baseball through a number of years, its owners and their fates allows the author to portray the various complexities that can bind seemingly disparate characters to a single item. Whilst at the same time featuring some of the key events of the late twentieth century American history ranging from the nuclear bomb and nuclear waste, the Vietnam War and its war protests, to more prosaic elements like sex, race, poverty, serial killers, art, cigarettes, condoms and graffiti to name but a few. All are connected to the life of Nick Shay by ways of the 'six degrees of separation'. All is rooted in contemporary life in all its ugliness and grandeur,

The novel is not told in chronological order. The book starts in 1951 then moves forward immediately to 1992 before cutting back to and fro through the intervening decades.

In many respects this novel goes a long way to reminding what we love about books as it can make seemingly ordinary lives seem quite extraordinary and I have to say that I enjoyed the author's writing style yet I feel that this book is 200 if not 300 pages too long making it an OK read rather than a great one.

I listened to the audiobook version of this book, narrated by the same guy who narrates the Jack Reacher series, by Lee Child, incidentally. He does a good job reading this book, which I'd been meaning to read for a long time, ever since I saw ads for it back on the subway in New York back in 1997/1998, Don Delillo being one of the great white giants of literature.
While I liked White Noise, which I read a long time ago, I couldn't help but feel a great portion of this book was like an author's exercise in onanism -- adjectives spurting out needlessly, constantly, extravagantly; the almost verbatim transcript of a Lenny Bruce act was painful, drawn out; mansplaining before mansplaining was even a thing.
Thanks to the miracle of audiobooks, I was able to speed it up to try and get through it, and I'm sort of glad I did -- the ending was a good little gut punch, but I have to wonder if it was worth the slog through the rest.

What a long, strange trip it is.

Extraordinary, and truly unique. Its power comes from the layering of seemingly disparate story lines and characters back and forth in time and place. The cumulative effect is ultimately staggering.

My wife asked, "What's it about?" and I didn't know where to begin. A baseball? The Cold War? Garbage? Family? Technology? Government and corporate intrusiveness? Marriage and relationships? Crime and punishment and rehabilitation? Art? Race? Celebrity culture? New York City? America? History and memory?

Whatever. It doesn't matter. It's an exhilarating and unforgettable joyride.

Pair this novel with Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" and "Freedom" and you won't get a much better sense of America since World War II -- how we live and the world we live in.

Ik kan tamelijk kort zijn over dit boek: ik hield er gewoon niet van. Neem nu de proloog: 60 bladzijden van verbale acrobatie over een baseball-wedstrijd uit 1951 die veertig jaar na datum nog altijd tot de verbeelding spreekt. Ok, DeLillo haalt literair werkelijk alles uit de kast om hetzelfde effect te bereiken als een vinnige, doorgemonteerde openingsscène in een film die een uurlang op je netvlies blijft trillen; maar net dat mag je niet doen met proza, vind ik; laat elk medium toch gewoon zijn eigen sterkte houden. En dan dat cliché om in te zoomen op cultfiguren als Frank Sinatra of J. Edgar Hoover die ook in het stadion waren en die allerlei bespiegelingen over de Koude Oorlog ten beste geven.
Wat volgt, is een meanderende, caleidoscopische roman waarin zowel de baseball-wedstrijd als de Koude Oorlog de verbindende thema’s zijn: het is zo gezocht, zo artificieel, dat het lijkt alsof DeLillo zegt: “Kijk eens wat ik allemaal kan te voorschijn toveren, hoe ingenieus ik de dingen kan maken…” en daarbij vergeet dat het ook nog ergens over mag gaan.
Neen, dit boek is echt niet aan mij besteed.

Even though this is a long book I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. From the prologue I was hooked. By the way, everyone loves the prologue best. But the book as a whole, I don't know how to describe it. It's a stand-alone novella in itself. I guess I could equate Underworld to a bumble bee ride. At times the plot flies over time and space, flitting from one character to another without really touching down long enough to establish foundation. But, there there are other times this bee lands, spends an inordinate amount of time digging around one particular scene and rooting among the details; rolling through the dialogue and repeating itself a lot. Diverse yet nitty gritty. If you get to the part when Nick is trying to talk to his wife while she watched a movie you'll see what I mean. Excruciating! I found their dialogue painful.
As a whole, Underworld is a biography of 20th century American culture, flayed and dissected and analyzed. Guts and all. It's 50 years of society spanning the country, from Arizona to New York and points in between. It's 1951 and fifty years beyond. There is no real plot. There is no real point other than to show the complexities of the times we live in.

This is a very disjointed book. The skipping back and forth makes the story-line difficult to follow. I finished this novel but I would not recommend it.

This needs some explaining. After rating many hundreds of read books, this one had me the most perplexed as to how to rate it. I was thinking, either a 3 or a 5. A three>, or a five?! It was suggested I average it out as a 4, but that seemed to me to just misrepresent both ratings.

There is no question for me that the writing in this book is 5 star, all the way. Though the lengthy baseball stadium scene at the beginning, packed with American cliches and the slapstick team of Hoover and Gleason, started me off decisively thinking I was not at all going to like this book, it won me over with its amazing presentation and acute powers of observation. To my amazement I found myself eventually able to see the baseball game (and fans) from a whole other perspective than I thought possible. This is 5 star stuff. And it just keeps going, and going, and going...

And yet, honestly, the book is extremely American, and as much as I'm dazzled by the writing and observations, the characters and content just don't speak to me personally very much. Hence, for me, though the writing is top notch, I can't get much beyond "liked it" (3 stars).

So, seeking enlightenment, I naturally read a bunch of reviews here to get a sense of how others have evaluated this work. There's very little middle ground. There's a blanket of 4 and 5 stars, peppered with shotgun blasts of of 1 star holes.

The 1 star hits are, without a doubt, the more substantial (sadly) and fun to read. I guess the 5 star reviewers are just too in awe and humbled to attempt to write anything insightful after completing the masterpiece? What more is there to say?

I am in entire sympathy with most of the 1 star reviews I read. Yes, the book really feels long. Yes, what "plot" there is, there hardly is. Yes, Delillo is brutally long winded. Yes, it can't help but drag on probably even the most ardent fan in places. Yes, it's really hard to hang on to the thread, and not drift off into the aether of words.

I am in sympathy with those who "did not like", for these reasons. They are justified in this perspective. And yet I am also sad. They seem to have missed so much. I feel, when confronted with such a sweeping, complexly structured, and yet minutely detailed work as this, that the lack is in us the readers rather than in the text. This is a work we really do need to expand ourselves and apply ourselves to connect with, as lovers of literature, lovers of observation, and lovers of life.

And so, slightly ironically, it was the delightful and painful one star reviews that pushed me from the middle of the road into the extremely starry expanse. This book deserves the stars, even if I don't entirely feel them.

I still like White Noise more (the only other Delillo I've thus far read) -- though it has less stars from me.

I hope this explanation of my here aberrant rating is satisfactory (to me).

There should be a "read-enough" shelf. I do not like this book. I didn't like it while I was reading it, I'm not liking it while I'm thinking about it, I resent it sitting on my bedside table taking up vaulable book real estate. I cannot recall what it is about and I don't think I even understood while I was actively reading it but it's been so long I just don't know. The writing, as it were, is on the wall. I'm giving up on this terrible, terrible book.

To put this giving-up in context, this book is the only - the ONLY - book I haven't completed once it got onto my list. I don't know what it says about me that I will waste my time reading complete crap even after I realize the completeness of it crappiness, but it definitely says something about this book that even I will not waste any more of my time on it. Don DeLillo, you should be ashamed of yourself.

I first experienced the work of Don DeLillo in a college class on postmodern American literature. White Noise was easily my least favorite of the novels we read that semester...and yet, for some reason, I keep coming back for more of DeLillo's work. This is the fourth book of his that I've read, and it suffers from the same problems I have with each of the others.

First off, DeLillo's style always leaves me with the feeling that he's just trying too hard. Yes, this does result in some amazing prose, but only in places, and not enough, in my opinion, to justify the off-puttingness of the rest of it. Most writers edit their work to make it more clear; I feel like DeLillo edits his work to make it more obscure. I feel like he's more concerned with the language than he is with the story. There's a balance to be found there, and he just rarely strikes it for me.

On a somewhat related note is that I just never really feel like DeLillo's characters are real people. For me, good literature begins with vivid, real characters--not necessarily likable, but believable, flesh and blood humans in all their glory and fallibility. That's something I've never found in any of DeLillo's work. Now, I know that one theme of postmodern literature is disconnectedness, so maybe that's intentional on his part. I can respect that, but it leaves me cold. I get to the end of the book, and all I really feel is "eh."

Now, all that said, there's definitely something about this book. It has a grand scope, painting a picture of America from the beginning of the Cold War through the beginning of the Internet age. There's no questioning its ambition. It also has some interesting things to say about waste, about war, about culture and environment, and about threads that run through our lives. It was worth reading; I guess I was just hoping for more from a book I had heard so many good things about.

I think I'm going to give DeLillo one more chance. I haven't read any of his short fiction, so I'm looking forward to The Angel Esmeralda, which, from the title, I'm guessing has some connections to Underworld. Hopefully his short stories will grab me in a way his novels have failed to do.

I started out really loving this book. At 827 pages, it was quite a commitment and it came at just the right time - I was looking to totally immerse myself in a story of epic proportions. While it started out that way, it didn't hold my interest quite as well as I'd hoped.

If this book is any indication, there's no questioning DeLillo's place among the great living literary legends. He is an expert manipulator of the English language and he managed to make it easy to keep track of dozens of characters. The fact that this book centered around a baseball game didn't hurt either.

I did enjoy reading this book but it also felt so massive, so serious and so “Very Important”, that I felt overwhelmed by it, and found myself needing to put it down and pick up another book, for days at a time. I've felt this way about books before, but with other books it's been a case of being emotionally exhausted by an extremely intense narrative. In this case, I just got tired of listening to him wax philosophical.

In summation : It was an excellent book, though I've seen it listed a few times as one of the top 5 American novels of all time, and with that I have to disagree. I would recommend it to someone who wants to become totally immersed in a long tale, and someone who likes non-linear plots, as it does jump around constantly, from one decade to another.

A baseball - that connects so many lives. Too many. Had a hard time keeping up with all the different characters and the time jumps.

Don Delillo’s cold-war opus, Underworld, leaves me underwhelmed. The scope of the novel – over 800 pages, divided into prologue, seven main parts, and an epilogue, littered with over 100 characters, spanning from the 1950s to the dawn of the internet-era in the 90s – just did not hang together for me. There is a certain flatness and thinness that mires the total-effect of the narrative; it’s difficult to divine the basic thrust linking all these themes (the mind-numbing hum of 20th century technological America, mortality, nihilism, violence, marital infidelity, love, luck, etc.) and all these sundry minor characters that Delillo summons to stand for them (the Texas Highway-Killer, for instance, appears throughout the middle of the book for several lengthy sections but seems to have no bearing on the book as a whole).

But perhaps this sense of sprawling disjunction is precisely Delillo’s desired effect. Delillo is here, as elsewhere, interested in the historical—“longing on a large scale is what makes history” (11)—which precludes centering a novel on a single character, relationship, or theme. If the book has a “hero” (although the counterpane’d texture of it would seem precisely to preclude any gestures of classical heroism) it is the Hemingwayesque Nick Shay. Nick, or Nicky, as he is known in the 50s-era Bronx parts of the book, is, like many Delillo heroes, a twist on the classical all-American guy; he’s got a family, a wife, kids, and a corporate job, but a past, a sin, a violent secret (the killing of a man in a bar when he was seventeen) that separates him out from the typical grain.

The problem with this America spinning around the psyche of Shay, his family, and his lovers—such as the older artist Klara Sax, who, on some level, seems to verge on a second protagonist, but remains marginal and undeveloped, I think—is that it’s not totally clear how the threat of nuclear war or the Cold War culture bear on that psyche. The novel’s minor characters are at turns funny, tragic, and wax philosophical, but are ultimately all vaporous, appearing splendidly in a puff of Delillo’s taut prose, then disappearing just as suddenly. The sprawling variety of the book—hop-scotching back-and-forth across years, people and places—suggests a grand narrative, but one never materializes. One is left with a numbness and a vague hope. A dry hope at best. But maybe, as I said earlier, all of this is Delillo’s point. The question is how one ought to respond to this. Perhaps it is an artistic failure. Or perhaps I'm just missing the point.