Customer Reviews

Underworld

5 star:		(161)
4 star:		(45)
3 star:		(47)
2 star:		(44)
1 star:		(48)

 

 

... Don DeLillo is an acquired taste. He loves repetition,which drives many readers mad. He has a powerful worldview, centeredon conspiracies and secret meanings. Political conservatives often despise him.

If you are new to DeLillo, you may very well enjoy his books. But please, do NOT start your DeLillo reading with this book. Start with a small, funny book like End Zone. Ease into White Noise, Mao II or Libra ... then take a crack at Underworld.

For those in touch with DeLillo's dry humor and in love with those picture perfect sentences that seem to appear out of thin air, Underworld is the ultimate feast. It is a culmination of his themes about modern America ... but it's also a miraculous collection of vignettes.

What other writer would dare imagine a series of Lenny Bruce monologues during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Or conjure up a forgotten Eisenstein film? Or rediscover the bizarre coincidence of Frank Sinatra, Toots Shoor, Jackie Gleason and J. Edgar Hoover all attending the Giants-Dodgers playoff game?

I'm in awe of DeLillo. His universe may be cold and spare, but I believe that's because he sees our world more clearly than most. He gets under the emotions and styles of the day ... he finds the secret histories. END

Don Delillo does not traffic in plot-driven novels. Delillo specializes not in creating "stories", but in creating vignettes, in creating moments full of weight, intensity and the impact of history. In Underworld, Delillo has brought this specialty to a stunning apotheosis. As a result, attempting any meaningful summary of the plot is not only nearly impossible, it is entirely beside the point.

The opening 100 or so pages - impressionistically describing the final game of the 1951 pennant race between the Dodgers and the Giants as attended by J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra - is an absolute tour de force: quite possibly the best 100 pages of any book in the last ten years. The omniscient narrative flows effortlessly back and forth between Hoover et al. to Cotter, the man who catches the "shot heard 'round the world." From there, the book jumps forward to the present day (or thereabouts) and flows backward through time, loosely following the caught baseball as it passes hands over the years.

All of this, however, is simply the armature which Delillo uses to explore his central theme: what living with the bomb for the last 40-50 years has done to us as a country, as a culture, and as a society. Using the Bronx as his guide (although one gets the feeling that the Bronx guides Delillo as well), Delillo suggests that the Cold War has created irreparable rifts in our society, has diminished our sense of "connectedness" to each other, has destroyed our sense of community. In his evocative epilogue, Delillo clearly hints that the Internet may create or exacerbate similar ill-effects in the future (I emphatically agree, as I sit here and type out a review that will only be seen over the Internet).

Rich in symbolism, layered in meaning, this is a book that will force you to confront serious philosophical questions, yet it is still a thoroughly enjoyable read, and never bogs down in pedantry. This is not a perfect book, however, and suffers from one of Delillo's recurrent flaws: the inability (or unwillingness) to create a fully-realized and dimensioned character (although Cotter and Shay come as close or closer than Delillo has elsewhere). Again, though, since the book is not character or plot-driven, this flaw is minor here.

I might add that I am not particularly a fan of some of Delillo's other work. I found White Noise to be practically unreadable (some great set pieces, yet annoyingly repetitive and unengaging), Great Jones Street and Mao II just plain boring. In other words, if you have not been thrilled by Delillo in the past, do not let this prevent you from considering this important book.

It took me almost two months to finish this book. It's long, 827 pages, and complex.

It starts on October 4, 1951 when Bobby Thompson hit the home run in the last of the ninth inning, thereby winning the pennant for the Giants against the Dodgers. The same day, by coincidence, the Russians exploded their first nuclear bomb.

These two themes, baseball and nuclear war, run throughout the book. There are dozens of characters and hundreds of incidents and it all seems like a very loose jigsaw puzzle that doesn't quite fit together. It's art the way a surreal painting is art, the tone set by the author's mastery of language and unique detail.

The main character is Nick Shay, a man raised in the Bronx and now a nuclear waste expert living in Arizona. All the other characters had smaller roles. There's an artist who leaves her family, a chess player who loses games, a serial killer who randomly kills people on the highway, a fanatic collector of baseball memorabilia. There's also Lenny Bruce. They're all were part of the total form, though, which was, in reality, only peripherally about it's characters. The book was about America from 1951 until the present day and how the threat of nuclear war effected our lives.

Having lived through this time, I remember the classroom drills. We would all crouch under our desks when the teacher said "take cover," and I remember being issued a dog tag to wear. I must admit that during those years, however, I never was seriously afraid of nuclear war.

Some of the most chilling parts of the book are the descriptions of a clinic in the Soviet Union where victims of living downwind from the blasts are treated. This is in sharp contrast to the description of the blandness of American life. I almost laughed out load at the chapter about a housewife in America determined to get her jello parfaits just right, tilting the glasses in the refrigerator to layer the jello.

There's a "Underworld" beneath the surface of our lives. It is there in the potential for disastrous destruction; it is there in the handling of waste material; it is there in various disappointments and paranoias of life. Much of this book was not comfortable to read.

This is serious fiction with a serious theme. It is not for everyone.

Just as the Bush Administration has been accused of being a Cold War administration in search of an enemy, Delillo might be a Cold War novelist in search of a subject. Underworld takes as its main theme the Cold War. Not, as other novelists might attempt it, about characters and their mirco stories as they were shaped by the period, but about the Cold War itself, as an epic, ideological phenomenon, and how all human lives were bundled under its steely umbrella.

Delillo is a big canvas novellist, and this is his biggest. He uses big social scapes to play out his scenes - baseball, the graffiti in the Bronx, the B2 Bombers laden with missiles on the North Atlantic run, waste, childhood fear. Underworld is a sprawling epic that achieves its effect by fusing a plethora of characters and scenes together in a tough, boiler plated, jazzy style. It clearly aspires to great American novel status, and at times achieves it. The opening shot-heard-around-the-world scene at the baseball game is justly acclaimed in its panoramic stylish detail and multi layered intellectual and artistic weight. From then on the narrative swells and roils through time, character and space through the ensuing half century as characters search for meaning, survival and love in a menacing period.

850 or so pages is mighty big for a novel. Too big I reckon. The book doesn't quite sustain the weight and there is a much pointed out sag in the middle where the pace and heft of the stories and ideas flatline for a few hundred pages.

Still, Underworld is an epic novel, by one of America's finest living novelists, and contains much that commands our attention.

I realize that I have given away my intellectual shallowness with this title, but I have to admit to finding this book about as much fun as a root canal. After being captivated by the prologue, set at the Polo Grounds in 1951, I expected similarly beautiful and sweeping writing going forward.

What I got instead was a writer who seemed intent on using every metaphor, every arcane artistic term and name and every meticulously researched, but superflous fact he could. The effect is that of an author trying to show how smart he is, and getting bogged down. Having poured so many words into it, rather than editing out the fluff, he instead goes on a book tour and presents it as high art.

The book has its moments. Beyond the prologue, the characters are interesting enough. He just doesn't do enough with them. They're all dressed up and have no place to go.

I read this book because I wanted to become a more rounded reader. I wanted a critically aclaimed opus that would take some time and effort. What I got was the literary equivalent of a death march, bringing only relief, no joy or enlightenment, when I finished.

You can pick any page of this book at random and find a passage that's magnificently crafted; that's what motivated me to buy it and read it. It's not really a story as much as a meditation, and it's not a narrative as much as a masterful interweaving of motifs and themes. As far as character development, well, I don't mind if books give characters a back seat to ideas, which seems to be what Delillo is doing.

But, despite Delillo's technical prowess, the book ultimately left me kind of cold. It's an ambitious vision of post-war America, but for Delillo that mostly means New York City (sometimes Arizona), baseball, trash (literally), and nuclear bombs. This doesn't seem like a particularly interesting collection of themes, at least not for me. And Delillo's narrative voice seems often to clash with his subject matter; he's good at writing in a lyrical, poetic, quasi-mystical voice, but tends to aim it at undeserving targets. E.g., he marvels at the interconnectedness of all things as reflected in the contents of a trash can: all the pieces of trash came from somewhere, they'll all wind up in a landfill, they'll join with other pieces of stuff from other places, etc. And his "holy innocent" narrator voice doesn't seem to sit well with his worldly editorializing on social turmoil, political controversies, or the vulgarities and grit of life in New York.

Actually, juxtaposing the "sacred and profane", high culture and pop, the beautiful and the repellent is a main stylistic tendency of Delillo. For me it reached its ultimate in the early scene of Jackie Gleason puking on Frank Sinatra's shoes. I guess it's a credit to Delillo's descriptive powers, but I almost couldn't continue with the book after that point.

In all fairness it seems like the kind of book that needs more than one reading, but given its size and my initial impression of it, I doubt that I'll be returning, unless it's for a few random passages to admire Delillo's writing again. This is all a matter of gut reaction on my part, a question of taste. The critic Luc Sante, who I generally admire, is wild about the book, but I'm afraid I can't share his enthusiasm. You'll know after the first 100 pages if you want to continue (Jackie Gleason scene notwithstanding); if the music of Delillo's writing is alluring enough to you by then, you'll enjoy the experience of reading the rest of the book--even if, like me, by the end you ultimately don't consider it an all-time favorite.

Works of art that are considered masterpieces now were greeted with bewilderment when they first appeared. For example, Moby Dick by Melville or Leaves of Grass by Whitman, or even the paintings of Van Gogh. Critics reacted negatively or maintained a position of neutrality about their worth. It seems that they had to wait for the works to gain an audience. I just finished reading Underworld and I really don't know what to make of it. The novel is so winding and vague and long that i dont remember half of the content. It seems like the parts that really stand out to me are the beginning and the whimpering end. I mean if you're going to attempt to write the equivalent of War and Peace for the nuclear age, you had better be a master of the long form novel. Delillo's style is suited more for shorter works. I don't know why I kept reading this book until the end. Probably because its variety and hopping back and forth in time did not let me get into a rut of boredom. There are 3 running themes or symbols throughout the book. The first is the baseball, the shot heard round the world, which is grabbed by Joseph Cotter, a young black kid. He is for all practical purposes the first cause from which the novel evolves. The baseball seems to encapsulate a moment of innocence and a longing for childhood and simpler times as a variety of characters quest for it or possess it. Nick Shays, the main character, is its last owner, and to him in symbolizes freedom and a time in his life when he did "live", without being sucked into a job he doesn't care about and all the responsibilities of the american dream. The second theme is that of the shadow of fear cast by the possibility of nuclear war. The characters use the cold war as a means of comfort. They are able to paint the world in terms of black and white: USA vs. USSR. As the characters reach the 90's there is a sense of loss because some of them have anchored their belief systems on this war that no longer exists. The last symbol that comes up a lot is the subject of waste. We have refuse, we have nuclear waste, we have organically made feces. The authors criticism of wasteful americans is completely in the foreground. Dump sites are treated as views of epic landscapes. Genetic freaks caused by nuclear radiation are described in terms of beauty. As for characters and plot, they're practically non-existent thanks to the jumbled mess that is this book. I admire Delillo for what he attempted here but his talents do not lie in making epic productions. His genius lies in the small scale.

Possibly no one writing today writes a sentence better than DeLillo. Sometimes he's so good with syntax and diction he can make you swoon. But if there's a heart beating under all that icy, finely machined prose, it's hard to discern. And so the problem with Underworld is that it's a bit like spending weeks hugging a glacier. Humor, insights, compelling characters are supplanted by DeLillo's way with words. Language for language's sake. Language is the real character and concern of the novel, and finishing it bestows a sense of accomplishment, as if one scored a personal tour de force nearly as laudable as writing it. But it likely won't leave you changed in any measurable way. Diction and irony are fine, but not at this length. Underworld seems to have a message. If it only had a heart.

Underworld is one of my all time favorites. It beautifully written, layered, complex, with very rich characters that will keep you thinking long after finishing the novel. It follows multiple people, diverse, yet similar in that they are searching for meaning, understanding, love, and everything that we are all searching for, over the last 50 years of American society. The event that begins the novel is the shot heard round the world. Ostensibly this is the dramatic Bobby Thomson home run that miraculously won the pennant for the Giants. Ironically, the other shot heard round the world the same day was the USSR's first nuclear detonation which began the cold war and left Americans living for the first time under a cloud of fear of immediate destruction. Perhaps something changed at that time in the American psyche. Certainly these two events are juxtaposed and central to the novel. The characters come from this conflicted time in history and the reader follows them intently over the next 50 years. Their lives are described through a series of short stories or vignettes that are linked in some cases randomly, by transition of ownership of the famous baseball, by friendships, brief affairs, chance meetings, or involvement with the arms race. In some cases famous historical figures such as J. Edgar Hoover, and Lenny Bruce enter the novel. These moments are darkly humorous, but also very touching in the human and vulnerable portrayal of these individuals. I found them welcome interludes to the fictional narrative. The novel contains multiple characters. Nick Shay is probably the main one. He is a tough kid growing up in the Bronx in the 50's, scarred when his father disappears. He is involved in an accidental shooting in his teens, then attends a jesuit school, and finally becomes an executive for a major waste management company. He is a deeply thoughtful individual and there are many vignettes about modern waste management which range from hilarious to frankly disturbing. There are other main characters beside Nick equally rich in description and depth of portrayal, artists, chess players, teachers, nurses, nuns. A great diverse group of people trying to find meaning through love and work in these difficult times. One also finds many minor characters in the novel such as the Texas Highway Killer who may have only a vignette or short story. I think that they give a sense of this conflicted time in American society and add to a certain bleakness to the landscape of the book. This emptiness and sense of human frailty is part of the underworld of the novel that the characters seek to resolve. The journey can never be completely finished, but I had a sense of optimism after finishing the novel.

Underworld is one of those books that is apparently written for people that are a lot smarter or more sophisticated than me. Bottom line, I just didn't get it. I weathered all 825 pages waiting for the pay off, and it just never came. That having been said, there were parts of the book that I really enjoyed, that were well written, well researched, well presented. Some of the characters and their tales were at times interesting and engrossing. Clearly, the book was thoroughly researched.

But at the end of the day, I could never really understand Delillo's point. I understood his dislike for the modern world, the parallels between Bobby Thomson's "shot heard round the world" and the Russian's testing of an atomic bomb, and the fact that waste was taking over the world. But the various subplots, the various stories the various characters never came together. What exactly was the point of the book--I simply can't say. But maybe that was the author's point. In some ways, I felt that the author tried to say too much, and ended up saying much too little. But again, maybe that was the point.

Other commenters have called the book presumptuous. Frankly, that conclusion requires an understanding of the book and the author's intentions that I was never able to obtain. For me, the book, while enjoyable in places, was pretty much a long, painful, dizzying, disjointed huh? But that's probably just me!