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    Underworld
    Underworld
    Underworld
    Audiobook31 hours

    Underworld

    Written by Don DeLillo

    Narrated by Richard Poe

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
    Finalist for the National Book Award
    Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
    Winner of the Howell’s Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
    One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books

    “A great American novel, a masterpiece, a thrilling page-turner.” —San Francisco Chronicle

    *With a new preface by Don DeLillo on the 25th anniversary of publication*

    Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel was a major bestseller when it was published in 1997 and was the most widely reviewed novel of the year. It opens with a legendary baseball game played between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants in 1951. The home run that won the game was called the Shot Heard Round the World, and was shadowed by the terrifying news that on the same day, Russia tested its first hydrogen bomb. Underworld then tells the story of Klara Sax and Nick Shay, and of a half century of American life during the Cold War and beyond.

    “A dazzling, phosphorescent work of art.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

    “This is a novel that draws together baseball, the Bomb, J. Edgar Hoover, waste disposal, drugs, gangs, Vietnam, fathers and sons, comic Lenny Bruce and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It also depicts passionate adultery, weapons testing, the care of aging mothers, the postwar Bronx, '60s civil rights demonstrations, advertising, graffiti artists at work, Catholic education, chess and murder. There's a viewing of a lost Eisenstein film, meditations on the Watts Tower, an evening at Truman Capote's Black & White Ball, a hot-air balloon ride, serial murders in Texas, a camping trip in the Southwest, a nun on the Internet, reflections on history, one hit (or possibly two) by the New York mob and an apparent miracle. As DeLillo says and proves, ‘Everything is connected in the end.’" —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

    “Underworld is an amazing performance, a novel that encompasses some five decades of history, both the hard, bright world of public events and the more subterranean world of private emotions. It is the story of one man, one family, but it is also the story of what happened to America in the second half of the 20th century.” —The New York Times

    “Astonishing…A benchmark of twentieth-century fiction, Underworld is stunningly beautiful in its generous humanity, locating the true power of history not in tyranny, collective political movements or history books, but inside each of us.” —Greg Burkman, The Seattle Times

    “It’s hard to imagine a way people might better understand American life in the second half of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first than by reading Don DeLillo. The scale of his inquiry is global and historic… His work is astounding, made of stealthy blessings… it proves to my generation of writers that fiction can still do anything it wants.” —Jennifer Egan, in her presentation of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

    “Underworld is a page-turner and a masterwork, a sublime novel and a delight to read.” —Joan Mellen, The Baltimore Sun
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateMar 15, 2011
    ISBN9781442342569
    Underworld
    Author

    Don DeLillo

    Don DeLillo is the author of many bestselling novels, including Point Omega, Falling Man, White Noise, Libra and Zero K, and has won many honours in America and abroad, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel Underworld. In 2010, he received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award. He has also written several plays.

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    Reviews for Underworld

    4/5

    1,331 ratings42 reviews

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    • 5/5
      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...

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      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!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      It is not so much about baseball. It is the three dimensions of visual writing. This book is technicolor in your mind.
    • 4/5
      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
    • 3/5
      reveries for future garbage.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      Read the first 100 pages and quit. Didn't catch.
    • 2/5
      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...
    • 1/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      “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.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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).
    • 1/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      A baseball - that connects so many lives. Too many. Had a hard time keeping up with all the different characters and the time jumps.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      (This has ended up as a bit of a waffling review sorry; in my defence it’s a big book!)After being unimpressed by Falling Man I was a bit of a Don-sceptic, and remain so. I wanted to love this book: I love the ambition of it, the size of the themes (in a nutshell, American life in the second half of the 20th century) and the need to deal with them as a whole, the crunch in some of the writing, and much of the scattershot approach. One section, a collection of “fragments Public and Private in the 1950s and 1960s”, I thought excellent, putting across a captivating picture of a time by magnifying scattered episodes in the various characters’ lives. It was a condensed version of what I think the book as a whole hoped to achieve but, imho, generally didn’t.I think there are some pretty big flaws in the book. The main one is that the characters are rarely, if ever, engaging. I didn’t care where Nick Shay’s father had gone, nor how he ended up in a juvenile detention centre (not spoilers btw, points brought in early on), or about any of the characters except the boy who grabs the baseball at the book’s beginning, and his father, who recurs in three episodes. For a book over 800 pages long, this is a big deal – losing the traditional linear narrative is fine, fitting even, but the reader losing empathy for the characters is fatal. Often they seemed too weighed down by the books’ themes to breathe, and the knock-on effects in getting involved with them (and by extension those themes) becomes difficult. By the last hundred and fifty pages, I just wanted it to be over. Another beef is that a lot of themes and plot points are raised and then fall away, or come to nothing – there is an irritating preoccupation with the number 13 that seems to go nowhere except to portray a vague sense of doom and weakness in the face of fate. A plotline about a highway murderer doesn’t fulfill its promise; the media preoccupation with a movie of one of the killings echoes that surrounding the Zapruder film, which itself makes an appearance later in the text, but this display of a changing culture and the sources of its obsessions didn’t feel very satisfying. I was never far away from thinking “Yes, I see. And your point?”, and that ain’t good.That’s not to be totally disparaging, far from it; there’s some superb writing throughout (even the bad bits are written well, and the good bits, particularly the baseball game and the scenes with Lenny Bruce’s comedy routines, are brilliant), and it constantly seeks to challenge, which is a fine thing. I’d say there’s a lot to study here, and that’s both a mark of respect and an alienating thing – I can imagine someone writing a big essay on this book and taking more from it with further and deeper reading, but it’s hard to imagine someone loving it. Personally I don’t think I’d want to go back to it, or that it will live particularly long in the memory. One last thought: I kept thinking, even at its best moments, that this is a book which will make no sense to anyone except cultural historians in fifty years’ time; it’s too locked into the time and place, with all the internal reference points which someone from the time will recognise but are bound to, in future, pass people by. Even for me (I was 7 when the Berlin Wall came down), being part of a new era made engaging with the text even harder than it would otherwise be. Again, that’s not necessarily a huge flaw, but it does limit the audience who will really be able to appreciate the book.
    • 3/5
      Underworld is a stream of consciousness novel, but with a caveat: I don't mean the consciousness of an individual, but collective consciousness, the consciousness of a nation over the course of several generations. Reading this novel is a peculiar experience because I didn't get especially emotionally connected with any of the characters, and I got the sense that I as a reader wasn't meant to. Instead, characters wander in and out of the story, living their own lives without regard for the audiences' witness. The common threads that run throughout the meandering narrative are tentative: all about present tension and future anxieties that cannot quite be named, but are undoubtedly there. Characters live lives characterized by "the faith of suspicion and unreality. The faith that replaces God with radioactivity, the power of alpha particles and the all-knowing systems that shape them, the endless fitted links." It's quite modernist, this certainty that there's something in the world that's still worth pursuing but with deep uncertainty about what that might be.So maybe it's not fair for me to dislike this book because it lacks focus and meaning. That is, after all, the essence of modernism, so I guess it was successful in that respect. But the book had the chance to do something and become the "new Americana," this simultaneous distrust of and nostalgia for the country's past. So I wish it had pursued a sentiment and purpose to that end more strongly, even if it might have transgressed the ethos of modernist literature.
    • 3/5
      Hundred pages to go and I really couldn't care less.
    • 1/5
      Not only was this book a bestseller, you can find superlatives among the blurbs like "great American novel" and "thrilling page-turner." This book was runner-up in a 2006 New York Times survey of eminent authors and critics for best American novel in the last 25 years. All I can say is I felt about this novel the way I do about many a purported masterpiece hung in the Museum of Modern Art. Good God, why? By the end of a short section after Part One, 150 pages in of 827, I knew this book wasn't for me and stopped reading things through. (I did skim through the rest though.) I read even that far because the novel was on a list of literary fiction I'd been working through. I knew it was considered a difficult work and wanted to give it a fair chance to win me over. Otherwise, I would have stopped at the second page of story.I not only don't find this is a great book and a "page-turner," I think it's badly written. Let me give you examples of why--examples right from the first two pages that I'm sure many a critic think are the very signs of genius and might let you know if this is a book you would find a keeper or would leave you cold:He has never done this before and he doesn't know any of the others and only two or three of them seem to know each other but they can't do this thing singly or in pairs so they have found one another by means of slidy looks that detect the fellow foolhard and here they stand, black kids and white kids up from the subways or off the local Harlem streets, lean shadows, bandido, fifteen in all, and according to topical legend maybe four will get through for every one that's caught.Ah yes, the beloved run-on endless-sentence-of-doom, which, like the very doorstop length of the book, is supposed to demonstrate profundity. Let's have another sentence shall we?The faces of the ticket sellers hung behind the windows like onions on strings.Somehow, unlike Virginia Woolf's description of flowers like fresh laundry in Mrs Dalloway, this doesn't do it for me. Forced metaphors like this abound. Here, have one more sentence that struck me as typically clumsy:Some are jumping, some are thinking about it, some need a haircut, some have girlfriends in woolly sweaters and the rest have landed in the ruck and are trying to get up and scatter.This is in reference to 15 boys jumping the turnstiles to see a baseball game without paying for a ticket. So how is needing a haircut or having girlfriends in woolly sweaters relevant or add to the narrative at this point? All these quotes are from the Prologue of 60 pages that was published separately as "Pafko at the Wall." Even some reviewers who counted Underworld a mess thought that section brilliant. So if you don't find that Prologue a work of genius I don't think you're going to be in love with the rest of the book. I think that Prologue does say a lot about Delillo. Both it and a great deal of the book hangs on baseball as a metaphor for American culture. The Prologue is about a legendary game between the Giants and Dodgers in 1951--through it we follow not just one of those turnstile jumpers but characters like J Edgar Hoover and Jackie Gleason--who is described vividly and repellingly as throwing up on Frank Sinatra. That turnstile jumper, who skipped school and slipped in without paying for a ticket, finds a seat and is befriended by a man who buys him a soda. At the end of the game he'll wrench this man's fingers to pry the home-run baseball out of his hand. So, if baseball is America, then the message is America is grasping, greedy, thieving, treacherous and repellent. (One thing about Delillo is there's nothing subtle about how he pounds out his themes.)The bulk of the book then deals with the man who ultimately bought that baseball--Nick Shay--who is in waste management. When we turn to him in Part One, the omniscience of the Prologue with touches of second person turns to first person for this part, but there are still a lot of the hallmarks of the prose style of the Prologue. We get this long rambling scene in this part about condoms. The first person narrative is more accessible, but still at times disjointed, and we're headed to another extended metaphor: American culture as trash. You can tell looking at the section title pages that the main story is non-linear; like Pinter's Betrayal or the film Memento you work yourself backward from the early 90s to the early 50s in each of the 6 parts until you hit the epilogue set in the near future. After Part One, the point of view will shift again between first and third person. Nothing about this book is straightforward--not the prose, point-of-view, narrative, characters or the very thin plot.In short, if you're looking for a gripping story with characters you care about and a narrative that sucks you in, you're looking in the wrong place. But if you're a fan of "post-modern literature" with disjointed narratives and turgid, abstruse prose that revels in showing us the tawdriness of American life, by all means, go pick up a copy.
    • 3/5
      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.