Underworld [Paperback]

Don Delillo (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company (1980)
• ASIN: B000N7A5QO
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (345 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

238 of 254 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For DeLillo Loyalists, His Masterpiece, April 1, 2000

By 

Daniel M. Conley (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Underworld: A Novel (Paperback)

... 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

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Living with the Bomb, June 27, 2000

By 

Matthew A. Goodin ""my too sense"" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Underworld (Hardcover)

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.

81 of 91 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Of Baseball and Nuclear War, January 25, 2000

By 

Linda Linguvic (New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Underworld: A Novel (Paperback)

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.