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Underworld: A Novel Reprint Edition

by
Don DeLillo (Author)
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Don DeLillo (Author)
3.6 out of 5 stars 430 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0684848150
ISBN-10: 0684848155
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 848 pages
  • Publisher: Scribner; Reprint edition (2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0684848155
  • ISBN-13: 978-0684848150
  • Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.9 x 8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (430 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #22,273 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsFor DeLillo Loyalists, His Masterpiece
By Daniel M. Conley on April 1, 2000
Format: 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
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4.0 out of 5 starsLiving with the Bomb
By Matthew A. Goodin on June 27, 2000
Format: 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).Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsOf Baseball and Nuclear War
By Linda Linguvic HALL OF FAMEVINE VOICE on January 25, 2000
Format: 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.Read more ›
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3.0 out of 5 starsMighty themes
By Sirin on October 29, 2006
Format: Paperback
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 starsTwo Stars

Confus

Published 4 hours ago by Black & White
2.0 out of 5 starsRead with patience and commitment

The writing style of DeLillo in this novel that spans the 20th century is convoluted and sometimes hard to follow. Read more

Published 7 days ago by Suzanne Sellman
1.0 out of 5 starsOne Star

A fan of DeLillo in the past, this one made no sense to me.

Published 16 days ago by HERBERT LAMBERTON
3.0 out of 5 starsBeautiful writing, where's it going?

I have to say I am puzzled by this book. And after all, the author is so well respected that who am I to comment? Read more

Published 21 days ago by Barry Lenson
3.0 out of 5 starsMake Connections shorter

It was an amazingly slow read.... The central theme seemed to be the underworld of all things and how everything and all of us are connected but DeLillo's method of doing so was... Read more

Published 23 days ago by Whitney A. Price
1.0 out of 5 starsShould Be Called "Disjointed and Disappointing"

This book is so convoluted and hard to follow I gave up. By 4 chapters I got to the point where I just didn't give a rat's you know what about him or his baseball.

Published 25 days ago by Consumer Carol
3.0 out of 5 starsFlashes of Brilliance, but Overall Not a Compelling Read

Don DeLillo can write spellbinding sentences and paragraphs. There are also a few set-piece scenes in this book that are intriguing. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 starsA hefty load

A challenging read with a scattered focus covering the 60s and fifties,multiple nostalgic reveries.all beautifully written and gradually it pulls together.

Published 1 month ago by robert horn m.D.
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Exceptional book. Lovely prose. The opening is a grabber.

Published 3 months ago by Zach Urbina
4.0 out of 5 starsO_o

Holy long book! Not bad though.

Published 4 months ago by Ruzzel

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