Rating: 
Summary: Often interesting, but unnecessarily scattered & distracted
Review: Well, I'll quickly write something because I think calling Delillo's UNDERWORLD one ofthe most interesting or extraordinary novels in years probably is too much. There are people out there who will try to say that this novel is about "language," "America's consciousness," "a common history," and all of that ... but ask them, what does THAT mean? Don't let people get haughty. When it comes to critical commentary, often the emperor wears no clothes. UNDERWORLD is a novel that tries too hard, and as a result is about 300 or 400 pages longer than it needs to be. Who or what matters in this novel is not clear. (Really no thing or person matters -- and that in itself is important.) Ostensibly we are looking at people, trash, baseballs, nuclear weapons, highway killers, and all of THAT kind of stuff, but in fact we're not. Delillo is constructing an experience built around various soci-historical touchstones. Ultimately he rages against Cold War America, making the case that 1990s America is the trashy leftovers of a bunker mentality that fills America's post-WWII years. But, again, he does so via a tortuous route. The novel jumps around in a series of vignettes that diligently bow to America's recent and various literary fetishes (as if condoms everywhere and writing "piss" and "f---" into dialogue somehow in itself creates realism); it just isn't convincing. Delillo's writing is most lucid and inspiring when he is on more familiar, well-worn historical paths (thus I'm not inclined to rave about his contributions to any avant garde). What works is what is familiar in a rather high modernist mode (read for content, not form). So, okay, maybe we have a postmodern novel in the works here. Fine. But you don't make postmodernims -- postmodernism happens. If I want a postmodern experience I simply have to wake up in the morning. I'll read THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (UNDERWORLD's alter ego?) or run to my local sports bar for real pomo entertainment. If you check this book out, don't let the firts chapter fool you. (Chapter 1 is very good, the best in the book.) Jump ahead, try some other stuff, and see what you think. If you can handle wandering, sometimes puerile, prose, go for it. Be sure to hang in there for the last third of the book -- it gets better. Garbage figures as a major topos in this novel, and Delillo has (intentionally) collected a heap of trash here, but don't misunderstand me, the book does not stink. Nevertheless, this is not quite the cultural tour-de-force I expected. Often interesting, but unnecessarily scattered and distracted, I'll give the novel 7 or 10 stars (one of the stars is for effort).
Rating: 
Summary: Not so hot-runs the gamut of interesting to extremely boring
Review: When I read the original review I was interested because the book begins with the famous Thompson Home Run Game. As a lifetime Giants fan, I was intrigued and anxiously awaited the book's arrival. However, reading the book was a chore. The initial chapter with a young boy frantically scrambling for the home run ball led me to believe that I was in for a treat and would be through the 800+ pages in no time; I was wrong. No treat, and the book took forever (I'm not adverse to lengthy stories, I love Michener). There are a few sharp spikes in the story that captivate, but between those are long, ponderous passages where you just wonder what is going on and why--I found myself saying "get on with it." I finished it, but I was left wanting . . . wanting more fleshed-out spikes of interest and wanting less about characters that seemed like space fillers. I don't know why the editors love this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Perhaps greater than "The Grapes of Wrath"
Review: Dear God...Underworld...Book... This little book is the most important jumble of 26 letters I have ever come across. I won't go into a magnum opus review, but please, please read this book. I am a teacher of English, and in my opinion this is quite possibly the greatest American novel, a novel for our time. "What I long for are the days of disarray, when I didn't give a damn or a f--- or a farthing."
It made me weep. Peace.
Rating:
Summary: Signifying the Underworld
Review: Lenny Bruce is an anthropologist. Delillo brings this out. I can understand why the FBI was all over him--forget the dirty words, he was too smart, too much thinking for his own good. Comics were not supposed to think so much, to be critical. This was saved for the pundits and the socially acceptable speakers, the news media, the president. Here's Lenny Bruce playing Carnegie Hall--a 3 hour show! Here he is talking about jews, blacks, g-men, Castro, Kruschev--rewriting history for all of us, asking us to look underneath--and here's the tie-in with the title and theme of Delillo's novel: Underworld. Although the topics and moments he touches on involve famous and very ordinary people--these are the currents of the underworld, the unspoken, what Henry Miller referred to as "subterranean." Graffiti artists getting their pieces up all over the city, on the vehicles of the NYC underworld: subway cars. This is the vehicle of the signifier realized by some 13 year old kids from the Bronx. This is more than rebellion, this is langauge, this is a semiotics that is real, the striptease of the "A" train, coming to a borough near you. And the idea of "garbage", of "waste management", archeologists piecing through bags, Hoover sniffing around trashcans interpreting other people's waste. Contrast this with Nick who has made a career out of waste management--effective soltions for dealing with this underworldly bi-product, but only if the trashmen pick it up. The trashmen, who decide whether New York chokes on it's fetid, hermeneutically rich garbage, or whether it is taken back underneath, reworked into a landfill, a foundation. "This park here, son, used to be a garbage dump.
Rating:
Summary: DeLillo's wonderful (but ultimately frustrating) Underworld
Review: As a big fan of DeLillo's work, I eagerly anticipated the arrival of this novel. I'm finally finishing it, and I must say I'm ambivalent. On the one hand, DeLillo's prose is finer than ever, and his touch with dialogue is supreme. He hilariously approximates the rhythms of everyday speech like no other writer I'm familiar with. DeLillo's concerns in this book are extremely compelling to me: the consequences of the way we as a civilization have been living, the dark currents that run beneath the surfaces of business and government, the struggles of individuals to come to terms with themselves as decent people in the wake of their own horrible mistakes. He addresses these issues at times beautifully, yet, for me at least, unfulfillingly. I had some problems with the "postmodernist" organization of the book, such as its time-in-reverse stucture and the inclusion of so many random and only periperally related incidents and anecdotes: I worry that DeLillo uses these tricks to disguise the fact that he really doesn't have a very coherent path to the denouement in mind. And what is he really saying? Waste is bad? Okay, I agree, but I'm not sure much new light is shed here. Possibly the postmodern writer feels shedding light is no longer his concern. As a reader, I found White Noise and Mao II much more satisfying than Underworld. But I still love Don Delillo's work and will anticipate his next novel as eagerly as ever.
Rating:
Summary: Maybe a Masterpiece
Review: I've just finished Underworld. I am in awe. This is the finest work of American fiction I've read since discovering Faulkner twenty-five years ago. In recent years, I had come to believe that American novels were either narcissistic confessionals thinly disguised, or 'victimization' tales, whining for sympathy in the dimness of political correctness. DeLillo's novel is enough to give you faith in American literature: it's bold, ambitious, brilliant in places, and always absorbing. It may just be a masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: Breathtaking
Review: The most extraordinary reading experience I've had in years. Underworld is a glorious dark fugue of language and experience that leads not to some comforting, narratively tidy ending, but to where we were at the beginning -- alone with words and what we can recall of a shared history. If people are still reading 100 years from now, this is what they will read.
Rating:
Summary: A book that reminds us of the world's best fiction
Review: READ THIS BOOK. It's amazing to me that anyone could find it boring. I wanted it to go on forever. It was one of the best books I've read in years. It's literature, guys, not junk. You have to apply yourselves a bit, but it's well worth the trouble.
Rating:
Summary: This probably won't make any sense to you
Review: This book seems to take place entirely in the world described by Billy Joel's first albums--the chaotic seventies, full of "giants in the earth". It memorializes all the weird bits of American social history that I think make current American fiction so dark--gas lines, nuclear war, greed, power. Growing up in the sunny Reagan years it seems like a big dream that on Tuesdays my parents couldn't buy gas, but it happened. What was that like?, I often wonder. This is how. I've been waiting a long time for a book describing the interior mental life of young Italians in NYC and here it is. I read this book just for that and the opening baseball game scene but came away with so much more.
Rating:
Summary: death, be not proud
Review: When I finished the mighty tome, I came to that last irritating word and threw the thing across the room, at no small expense to plaster and paint. I was not sure if Delillo was the greatest writer in this decade--I can't do the Kakutani thing of "century" because it seems unendurably silly--or if he was a (re)creation of B. T. Parnum, the whole suckers and minutes thing. In the end--if there is such a thing--the book resists being a book. It is a compendium, a history, a notebook, a novel, a catalogue, a film synopsis, a stand-up comedy routine. It is cold and chilling in its refusals. Yet there stands that breathless prose. Those words, themselves the very underworld of the book, the things Marvin and others cannot remember for the life of them with their helter-skelter refusal to name, to see, to be. I leave my pronouns ambiguous, on the garbage heap of my prose, because that's what Delillo demands of me. He takes my words away. He leaves me with the unendurable silences that gap the story of his characters' lives, leaving them down wind, leaving their lives floating in a larger story that starts (like all history) butt-end first and drives back around the bases to its home plate.
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