Customer Reviews

Don DeLillo's Underworld: A Reader's Guide (Continuum Contemporaries)

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An excellent explication of DeLillo's most massive, sprawling fustercluck of brilliance. Along with DeLillo's White Noise, Underworld will still be read when we're all dead, and Duvall concisely crystallizes many of the reasons why. Underworld burrows beneath the sometimes shiny, sometimes scary surfaces of an enormous range of seemingly disparate Cold War territory, and Duvall goes a very long way (in a remarkably short space) toward putting together its pieces, and illuminating its insights. I read this reader's guide after reading Underworld, and it made me want to read the novel again. Bravo!!

How do you even begin to analyze the magnitude of DeLillo's achievement in 'Underworld'? This little book is a good place to start. Professor Duvall gives a brief and informative sketch of DeLillo's life and career to date and then dives into the meat of his book, wrestling with some of the themes - it would be impossible to do them all - of the novel. He comes over as well-informed, sharp and widely read, without ever being pretentious about it. And the book is even up-to-date enough to discuss the post 9/11 resonance of the novel's cover image.

At times a little dry for my taste, but that is a minor quibble. Duvall has packed a lot of thought into a nicely packaged book.

1) This book is very short. It's even shorter since some of it is stuff like telling you were to look on the internet for more information (so if you don't know how to use google maybe its helpful).

2) I didn't find much insight here, it's mostly showing how literary terms like "politicizing the aesthetic" and "aestheticizing the political" relate to the book. I don't find it added to my understanding of Underworld.

3) There are tons of typos in this book.

It basically reads like some college student's senior thesis that they turned in without even proofreading. Don't buy it. It exists for one purpose only - to get your money. Just my opinion, the other reviewers seemed to think it was good, but that wasn't my experience.