Rating: 
Summary: One Amazing Novel!
Review: This is a HUGE novel, both in length (over 800 pages) and in ambition, but is well worth the effort.
DeLillo starts things off with what is absolutely the most poetic
description of one of the most dramatic games in baseball history, the final playoff game between the Giants and the Dodgers in the Polo Grounds in 1951. He then slyly follows the path of the ball that Bobby Thompson hit for the deciding home run, as it is fought for, stolen, sold, and sold again and again,
finally being purchased by Nick Shay, a transplanted New Yorker,
now living in the suburbs of Phoenix. Here's the catch: Shay was a Dodger fan! So, the ball becomes a symbol not of victory over long odds, but of futility and loss. Loss is one key theme in this novel, the inevitable loss that occurs in life as the present fades into the past, the loss of relationships, the loss of roots, and the loss of identity as we remake ourselves.
DeLillo correctly identifies the remaking of one's identity as
a peculiarly American phenomenon, which leads him to a paralled
examination of American pop culture. Since the central character
works as a public relations officer for a waste management firm,
the central metaphor of the novel becomes pop culture as garbage.
On the one hand, he argues, pop culture is all that holds our society together, but on the other, it's all disposable. From Frank Sinatra to the Rolling Stones, from Jackie Gleason to Lenny
Bruce, from the flawed classics of Sergei Eisenstein to the superficialities of the contemporary art scene, DeLillo's eye
is dizzying and his insights are razor-sharp.
He counter-balances all this against the rise of the bomb and the sub-culture and paranoia that it spawned, a culture in which life itself becomes as disposable as last year's TV reruns.
This book thrives on jarring juxtapositions of time, place and feeling. You don't always want to go where the author is taking you, primarily because his skill in narrating his episodes is so keen, you don't want to leave one episode for the next. But that is part of the point. Life is change, according to DeLillo,
and change is always uncomfortable because it is so arbitrary.
There are enough ideas, both large and small, bouncing around in this novel to keep you thinking about them for weeks, months and years after you've read it. I read it 5 years ago, and I'm still thinking about it!
"I lead a quiet, non-descript little life, in a quiet, non-descript little suburb... just like anybody else in the federal witness protection program!"
Rating: 
Summary: Living with the Bomb
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Conspiracy as an exercise in God-imitation
Review: Ya know how people ordinarily play God thru power-tripping? Well, that's not the only way to play God. Another way to play God is to perpetrate mysterious conspiracies. How do I know this? Well, Don told me so himself. Via the following 2 quotes.
From UNDERWORLD: "Paranoid. Now he knew what it meant, this word that was bandied and bruited so easily, and he sensed the connections being made around him, all the objects and shaped silhouettes and levels of knowledge--not knowledge exactly but insidious intent. But not that either--some deeper meaning that existed solely to keep him from knowing what it was."
From UNDERWORLD: "A long time ago, years ago, I read a book called THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING ... And I read this book and began to think of God as a secret, a long unlighted tunnel, on and on. This was my wretched attempt to understand our blankness in the face of God's enormity. This is what I respected about God. He keeps his secret. And I tried to approach God through his secret, his unknowability."
Rating: 
Summary: A Disappointing Offering from a Good Writer
Review: "Underworld" is the type of novel that frustrates me. This is because DeLillo is a good writer and the ideas about which he writes are great, yet somehow he manages to create a mediocre work of fiction. I think that he tried to make his canvass too large and as a consequence DeLillo has created a novel that has little cohesiveness. The disparate characters and settings are united under the umbrella of the Cold War, but these sketches of prose and ideas never gel into a novel nor into a true story. I understand that DeLillo writes in a "post-modern" genre, more or less, yet a novel full of seemingly disconnected events still needs to have threads of story connecting them, however tiny these threads may be. As a series of vignettes or a colletion of shortstories it may have worked, but as a novel, it is too long and just doesn't work.
Rating:
Summary: Relentlessly Readable
Review: First, please do not believe this book is unreadable. If you are new to DeLillo (as I was; this is the first book I read by this author) know that the tag "unreadable" is a reductionist generalization.
It is important to understand, that while this book admittedly may be difficult in some ways (the episodic nature of the narrative, the leaping forward and - mostly - backward in time, its haunted lyricism), it is more reader-friendly than books that are generally cited as "unreadable," books like *Finnegan's Wake," "Gravity's Rainbow," even "Ulysses." *Underworld* is difficult sort of like Faulkner is difficult; the style is personal to the author, it is new and wildly, but also precisely imagined; it does not fly off the planet - or if it does, it does so on a literary kind of bungi cord, i.e., you will always be called to earth, via the vast, but essentially traditional humanism that is this novel's deeply embedded anchor.
The paradox is clear: critics who advise that the book is unreadable, by definition, cannot have read it - and thus are not qualified to review it. If they have, then, by definition, it is not unreadable. Duh. This book gives pleasure because it has taken pains.
I won't try to summarize the book and its many specific qualities because I think the Amazon review does that better than I could. Bottom line: I loved this book, in spite of the question marks that hover over many of the passages (don't worry if you don't get something the first or second time it appears in the prose; you aren't supposed to get it yet). As I read along, I came to realize that the novel was teaching me how to read its own prose, and so I allowed the novel to lead me through its mysteries. I do not regret it. I trusted the story teller to tell me the story he meant to tell, and I trusted my own ability to wait for the punchline, and I stand in awe as a result. If you are willing to trust an 800+ page book with an investment of time and attention, this book should not disappoint.
Rating:
Summary: The World Above and Below
Review: This is a powerful look at what lies beneath. Yes, it is a big book, and it does take a lot of time to read it. Its rewards, though, are great.
Strangely enough, when the WTC towers collapsed on 9/11, I thought of the cover illustration for this book: the towers bracket the cross on top of the neighborhood church. What a metaphor: the towers are gone but the church, so close by, is none the worse for wear.
This book will wear well, too.
Rating:
Summary: Magical!
Review: I was so impressed with this book. It like a lyrical spin on the world since the nuclear bomb was created and the Soviets made one too. I couldn't tell you what the book was about in parts but I learned to relax and go where the book took me. It's one of the most worthwhile books I've read in a long time.
Rating:
Summary: Too Loong..
Review: Length is not a function of depth. In this book DeLillo adds a few hundred pages to the somewhat interesting postmodernist take on reality he presented in his more imaginative novel, White Noise. Indeed, since the plots of these novels are similar, there is no excuse for reading Underworld. This does not, however, imply that there is an excuse for reading the other novel. But, if you're looking fore something new to read, you could do worse than a 2-star novelist like DeLillo, who is at least trying to be meaningfully relevant.
Rating:
Summary: All sound and fury?
Review: What are we to make of <Underworld, DeLillo's 800+ page diary of individuals living under the very real threat, but later fading specter, of the Cold War? Whites, Blacks, Italians, Jews; men, women, children. From a historic baseball game in New York, to the Arizona desert, to the nuclear waste dumps of the former USSR; from the dimly lit mob hangouts of 1950s Bronx, to the ghetto of the 1960s, and the sterile Southwest suburbs of the 1980s, DeLillo takes us on a voyage to explore human lives reacting to, ignoring, and resisting the forces of New World power brokers--governments, corporations; and ideology.
In the obligatory post-modern disarray of narrative and sequential existence, DeLillo criscrosses space-time on a desperate search, along with his own characters; but--like them--on a lonely search. For what? Americana, baseball memorabilia, a vanished father, a map drawn on Gorbachev's head, mystical signs from above appearing on a billboard? Myriad symbols and patterns emerge to guide the desperate wanderers on their obsessive, hopeless quest: a significant baseball, graffitti, waste.
But to what end? I suspect this book has much more appeal to the boomers and the folks who grew up during and with cold war as DeLillo remembers it. This is not to mislead the potential reader into thinking that Underworld is "about" the cold war. But, in coursing through the lives of its characters--celebrities, government spooks, common folk, and clergy, one feels the sense and power of interconnectedness that unites disparate souls. DeLillo wields his scepter mightily, achieving an amazing complete omniscience over his charactera; and, at the same time, speaking from each of their minds--a collective omniscience, not an altogether deific one. In the end, though--for me, it was mostly lots of noise.
Rating:
Summary: One Amazing Novel!
Review: This is a HUGE novel, both in length (over 800 pages) and in ambition, but is well worth the effort.
DeLillo starts things off with what is absolutely the most poetic
description of one of the most dramatic games in baseball history, the final playoff game between the Giants and the Dodgers in the Polo Grounds in 1951. He then slyly follows the path of the ball that Bobby Thompson hit for the deciding home run, as it is fought for, stolen, sold, and sold again and again,
finally being purchased by Nick Shay, a transplanted New Yorker,
now living in the suburbs of Phoenix. Here's the catch: Shay was a Dodger fan! So, the ball becomes a symbol not of victory over long odds, but of futility and loss. Loss is one key theme in this novel, the inevitable loss that occurs in life as the present fades into the past, the loss of relationships, the loss of roots, and the loss of identity as we remake ourselves.
DeLillo correctly identifies the remaking of one's identity as
a peculiarly American phenomenon, which leads him to a parallel
examination of American pop culture. Since the central character
works as a public relations officer for a waste management firm,
the central metaphor of the novel becomes pop culture as garbage.
On the one hand, he argues, pop culture is all that holds our society together, but on the other, it's all disposable. From Frank Sinatra to the Rolling Stones, from Jackie Gleason to Lenny
Bruce, from the flawed classics of Sergei Eisenstein to the superficialities of the contemporary art scene, DeLillo's eye
is dizzying and his insights are razor-sharp.
He counter-balances all this against the rise of the bomb and the sub-culture and paranoia that it spawned, a culture in which life itself becomes as disposable as last year's TV reruns.
This book thrives on jarring juxtapositions of time, place and feeling. You don't always want to go where the author is taking you, primarily because his skill in narrating his episodes is so keen, you don't want to leave one episode for the next. But that is part of the point. Life is change, according to DeLillo,
and change is always uncomfortable because it is so arbitrary.
There are enough ideas, both large and small, bouncing around in this novel to keep you thinking about them for weeks, months and years after you've read it. I read it 5 years ago, and I'm still thinking about it!
"I lead a quiet, non-descript little life, in a quiet, non-descript little suburb... just like anybody else in the federal witness protection program!"
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