Rating: 
Summary: So beautifully smart.
Review: The book opens with a The Shot Heard 'Round the World from the 1951 Giants/Dodger's game. It ends with a nun finding peace and connection inside the Internet. In between it takes the reader through a flashing array of persons, places and events-- an array that defies description, I think.In a way, the book focuses on Nick Shay and his relationship with Klara Sax, and what happened as a result of that relationship. In a way, it's about art, particularly art in our modern era. In a way, it's about the journey of the baseball from the 1951 to Nick through all the stops on its passage. In a way, it's about goodness, and cities, and nuns moving through the urban badlands looking for stray children. It's also about garbage, and everything about garbage disposal. _Underworld_ is a big book, one that's been sitting on my shelf for far too long because I was a little bit afraid of something that long, but the reading experience itself never felt too heavy-- none of the pages felt unnecessary. I learned things from this book-- I was moved, and I often found it sweet. It inspired a kind of sadness, but not unpleasantly. A must-read, I think.
Rating:
Summary: Perfect
Review: I'm 22 years old. Before getting into the meat of this novel, when I learned that this book was going to cover decades, world events, and circumstances that I didn't live through (or was too young to be aware of), I got nervous. Maybe I wouldn't like the book because I was just too young. But DeLillo isn't writing TO a demographic; he's writing elegant, intelligent, intriguing, fun, exciting, accessible fiction. I have read "Lolita" and "The Corrections" and "Leaves of Grass" and "Crime and Punishment" and "Infinite Jest"---and DeLillo has topped them all and then some. You cannot get DeLillo off your brain (though I'm not sure why you'd want to); "Underworld" is relentless, it will not let you go. Ever. To say that this is an opus, an epic, is to misrepresent the essence of this book. It's not about a page count (though, yes, yes, yes, it is long--exquisitely long); it's about capturing the macro- and micro-dynamics of a culture. To my knowledge there is NO book that so wholly represents the state of American civilization over the last 50-plus years. If there is, I'd love to know, because to watch someone try to top this would be exciting. DeLillo is a genius--of both the scholarly and writerly types--and I am richer ... and even, yep, somehow OLDER ... because I devoured this novel. Bravo. You must read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Re-scripting the Scripted
Review: Most critics agree that Underworld represents the (as yet) most ambitious effort of one of America's most talented and successful contemporary novelists. DeLillo established his position as one of the leading lights of the American literary firmament with the critical and commercial successes of 'White Noise', 'Libra', and 'Mao II'. These works were, each in their own way, an exploration of the modern or post-modern condition--analyses of the life of eternal informational drift, of the manufacture of the self. With 'Underworld', DeLillo expands the scope of his investigations (to 800 pages!), while sacrificing none of his customary focus and insight. The characters are rich and full, exposed and penetrated in their actions rather than in naive or sentimental psychological examinations. DeLillo has always had the ability to invoke the commonplace experience in a way that is somehow more real than our own memories or depictions. He possesses a subtlety of insight which is oftentimes revelatory in its seeming omnipotence. Many times while reading 'Underworld'I simply had to stop and marvel at my ignorance of my own motives and sentiments. His insight into the habits and patterns of the day-to-day living of life are enriching and enlightening. Despite the potent accuracy of his observant eye, DeLillo's main strength is and has been his tremendous talent and control of language. His use of imagery is kaleidoscopically varied and dynamic. He renders speech in a penetrating and sometimes devastatingly affecting manner. Each page of this huge novel bursts with powerful beauty, and it is simultaneously explosive and readable on a higher level than even Rushdie's better works have ever been. In 'Underworld', DeLillo takes on the whole American Cold War culture with its particular concerns, leakages, breakdowns, and satisfactions, coming out on the other end telling an anti-history of staggering beauty, insight and relevance. When DeLillo embarked on the writing of this novel he was a respected and decorated novelist. In its production and wake he has established himself as THE greatest living American writer, and 'Underworld' is the finest English-language work to have been published in the 1990's.
Rating: 
Summary: Traverse this collage and transfix the elusive.
Review: This book is like a big prime number, it's impossible to break it down to a factorizing summary! Spread out over 800 pages and almost five Cold-War decades is a panoramic collage of fragments: themes, character portraits, cameos, loosely woven strands of sub-plots, chronicles and anecdotes. This terrain is traversed by Nick Shay, the main protagonist, and a host of other characters in their different times and places, sometimes together. It is all about the quintessence, or rather the plural of that term, of the age.
The chronological order is reversed, with some exceptions like in the case of the brilliant prologue, the subject of which is the famous Giants-Dodgers game of 1951 - the American Way, the icons, the paranoia and the bomb are all there.
DeLillo captures the elusive quality of things in some brilliant passages. Nick's encounter with former schoolmate Jerry Sullivan and his booze-driven premature nostalgia and sentimentality is one of many joycean-type epiphanies. There is the brilliant depiction of Bronzini and his wife Klara Sax, who as his former wife involves herself in the New York culture scene trying to span the gap between would-be artist and artist.
The fact that the book lacks a clear story line to propel the reader onwards means that this 800-page tome will not be to everyone's liking. I, for one, found it well worth the effort.
Rating: 
Summary: No Book Should be this much of an effort
Review: I realize that I have given away my intellectual shallowness with this title, but I have to admit to finding this book about as much fun as a root canal. After being captivated by the prologue, set at the Polo Grounds in 1951, I expected similarly beautiful and sweeping writing going forward. What I got instead was a writer who seemed intent on using every metaphor, every arcane artistic term and name and every meticulously researched, but superflous fact he could. The effect is that of an author trying to show how smart he is, and getting bogged down. Having poured so many words into it, rather than editing out the fluff, he instead goes on a book tour and presents it as high art. The book has its moments. Beyond the prologue, the characters are interesting enough. He just doesn't do enough with them. They're all dressed up and have no place to go. I read this book because I wanted to become a more rounded reader. I wanted a critically aclaimed opus that would take some time and effort. What I got was the literary equivalent of a death march, bringing only relief, no joy or enlightenment, when I finished.
Rating:
Summary: It contains multitudes
Review: How can one person sum up an epoch? Can it be done through the guise of one character's maturation during the years? Of course it can: it has been done, and will be done again. Perhaps a family saga will suffice, portraying various generations as representing different eras, different modes of thought. Or perhaps an author will choose instead an object to focus upon, as in E. Annie Proulx's ACCORDION CRIMES, following the travels of an inanimate thing as it passes through the hands and lives of unrelated peoples, each contributing to the picture as a whole. But it takes a special form of nerve to attempt to define an age without choosing one readily identifiable centre to the story. Don DeLillo has tried such a tact, and succeeded: UNDERWORLD is brilliant. If there is an identifiable plot, it follows the life of Nick Shay, an executive with a waste- management company who has certain reservations and regrets about past acts. But it's also about Klara Sax, an artist with whom Nick had an affair. It's about Matt, Nick's brother, who works in weapons research. It's about Bronzini, a teacher who tutors Matt about chess. It's about graffiti artists, and the atomic bomb, and New York. It's about Frank Sinatra, and recycling, and the World Trade Centre, and the Cold War. It's about baseball. In short, UNDERWORLD is about the last fifty years of American life. DeLillo jumps back and forth through time, following characters and themes that have little to relate to each other, but as a whole leave the reader stunned. It is a demanding book, not easy to read: it lacks a traditional narrative to cling to. It requires faith and patience, and rewards it in full. As a starting point, DeLillo takes a baseball game: THE baseball game, the World Series game between the Giants and the Dodgers, when Bobby Thompson snatches victory from the Dodgers with his game-winning run, and the Russian Empire explodes their first atomic bomb. In the space of sixty rivetting pages, DeLillo manages to encompass almost every facet of American existence of the 1950s. In one baseball stadium, he packs in racial tensions, class warfare, the first glimpse of the Cold War, and in one memorable corner, the trio of Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, and Jackie Gleason. DeLillo crams in so much that it's a genuine miracle that he pulls it off, yet he does, without even showing the sweat that was involved. The prologue to UNDERWORLD is, hands down, the most overwhelming piece of writing I have ever read. But DeLillo does so much more. As he travels from place to place, time to time, and character to character, he displays the breadth and power of an author in full command of his craft. In a novel that is impossible to summarize, DeLillo leaves the reader challenged: How do you recommend a book that you can't sum up? DeLillo makes no grand statements, but through the minutiae of his characters, he presents the sum of humanity. From the quiet despair of the poor, to the grand delusions and fears of the powerful, DeLillo manages to quantify the age through the actions of its people. DeLillo also has complete mastery of the written word. Consider this exchange: "I have a mushroom-shaped tumor." "Yes." "The doctor calls it a fungating mass." "I don't know that term." "I don't know it either. It's not in the dictionary because I looked in two dictionaries. When they get their terms outside the dictionary, it means they're telling you goodbye." In that small quotation, DeLillo captures so much about the personalities and beliefs of his characters. There's something about DeLillo's ear for dialogue and eye for detail that defies easy description. It's that indefinable quality that separates the merely great writer from the genius. As DeLillo develops his chronicle, using Nick as a signpost for each section of years, he travels over the course of the entire last half of the twentieth century, summarizing the loss of innocence that America experienced. And perhaps that is an inadvertent reason why UNDERWORLD is so potent a work. In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, it is impossible to read UNDERWORLD without realizing how much the world has altered over fifty years, and how easily and quickly it can change again. UNDERWORLD, if nothing else, stands as a definitive fictional account of the Western world before September 11, 2001. But aside from that, UNDERWORLD is a seminal piece of work, towering above those who it challenge it. As Michael Ondaatje accurately stated, "This book is an aria and a wolf-whistle of our half-century. It contains multitudes."
Rating:
Summary: Days of Disarray
Review: If you think you were paying attention during the last 40 plus years, wait until you read Delillo's account of the cold war and it's effect on several vivid characters in "Underworld." The prologue sets the tone with the 1951 pennant playoff between the Giants and the Dodgers, the simultaneous detonation of a Hydrogen bomb by the Soviet Union, and the interplay between Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and J. Edgar Hoover as they watch the game (and Hoover receives word of the bomb detonation). From there, the reader will time travel back and forth in the ensuing 40 years with lovers grown old with time as well as fatigue, an assassin driving the LA freeways looking for random targets, a nun and an "artist" who was once a vandal. Delillo's dialog and descriptions had me re-reading may parts just to enjoy the richness of his work. An example is the protagonist's view of life and himself toward the end of the 40 years:
"I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on this earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself." . . . Nick Shay.
The 800 or so pages flew by. don't miss it.
Rating:
Summary: The New Moby Dick
Review: The Great American Novel has been written -- again. DeLillo's Underworld is that book. In its scope, in its multiple and intertwined plot lines, in its uniquely American approach to universal themes, Underworld is simply the greatest novel since Moby Dick. It's also a pure joy for any lover of the language to read.
Rating:
Summary: Civilization during the Cold War expertly uncovered
Review: This magnum opus is Don Delillo's expertly crafted, extremely engaging, and multi-faceted account of the lives of a number of New Yorkers, both the famous and the not so famous, during the Cold War years and beyond. The potential reader must be cautioned that the style of _Underworld_ is episodic and circuitous, and may not be for every taste. I, myself, would occasionally lose track of the book's many characters and situations. However, there is much in the book to love and to chuckle over, and I found it well worth the journey.
The book's magically and humorously told prologue ("the past is prologue") recounts that early fall day in 1951, when Bobby Thomson hits the legendary "shot heard round the world" that won the National League pennant for the New York Giants against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Present at the Polo Grounds that day are Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, restauranteur Toots Shor, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and Cotter Martin, a young black kid who plays hookey from school, sneaks into the stadium, and then manages to catch Thomson's baseball. In its purposefully roundabout and zig zagging way, _Underworld_ follows the path of this extraordinary ball's ownership. One of the major motifs of the novel concerns the role of the "underworld" of waste matter or garbage in building civilization. As recounted by a one of the book's minor characters, "...cities rose on garbage...dictating construction patterns and altering systems of ritual...(people) had to come up with a resourceful means of disposal and build a social structure to carry it out--workers, managers, haulers, scavengers. Civilization is built, history is driven--". It is no accident that Nick Shay, a major character in this book, rose from his troubled boyhood to become a successful nuclear waste disposal engineer. Even J. Edgar Hoover's garbage is allegedly stolen by garbage guerillas to be gone through and analyzed. Hoover's retrieval of several pages of a magazine reprint of a magnificent, but frightening Breugel work of art flying around the stands at the end of that 1951 pennant race, would have become just another piece of debris to be swept up were it not for the FBI director's vigilence. Breugel's masterpiece is called to mind in a later part of the book concerning a potentially violent confrontation in a children's playground. We also find two nuns, one of whom is the elderly sister Edgar, working in the vast wasteland of a South Bronx neighborhood to provide food to the ill and the homeless. Out of this wreckage we meet a young, talented graffiti artist, Ismael, who assists the nuns in their work. Delillo shows a number of the real and the ficticious personages in the novel meeting and interacting with one another in an interesting manner in various scenes throughout the book. Toots Shor is referred to as placing bets with Nick's father, Jimmy, who disappears while supposedly going out to buy a pack of cigarettes. Jimmy may or may not be a victim of another part of this "underworld." The book also presents the late, underground humorist, Lenny Bruce, telling jokes in the underworld of America's comedy caverns related to President Kennedy and the then Soviet Premier Krushchev, in the time of the Cuban Missile crisis. After the sad death of one of the unfortunate young denizens of that South Bronx neighborhood, the end of _Underworld_ suggests a chance meeting between J. Edgar and Sister Edgar in a better, happier world.
Rating: 
Summary: Long, overdrawn
Review: Might have been a decent read if it had been edited. From time to time the story line would get interesting and I would try to stick out the book to the end. Unfortunately, the few pages that flowed were followed by another 75 or so pages that didn't. Boring, confusing, and by page 400 just not worth finishing.
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