Rating: 
Summary: The book of twins
Review: I wondered, September 11th, what DeLillo must be thinking. The World Trade Center is the backdrop for much of this book. Now it's just a strange sight among the books on my shelf. The way the towers disappear in the clouds is simply uncanny. I don't know what to make of it now since the text reaches out, in its last words, toward peace. I mean I didn't exactly believe the transformation of Nick from inner city tough to citizen, but does it matter. Odder things have happened. It's ironic that a book by DeLillo, who for the last thirty years has been absorbed in the fantasies of popular culture, could itself be transformed into an artifact, a curio. Read it. It's beautiful and fine.
Rating: 
Summary: WONDERFUL WRITING, ABOUT... ABOUT...WELL, ABOUT 827 PAGES
Review: This is sucha too-clever book. DeLillo puts such creative brilliance into what he's saying that I can't glimpse what he's
saying. In UNDERWORLD it's execution five stars, content/structure/storyline/character maybe one. Alot like today's TV commericals and pop music. I'm 260-some pages in and wish I'd taken notes on relationships and reasons why these strangers are doing whatever they're doing and wondering why I should care about them or what this book's about other than wonderful wordplays. UNDERWORLD seems mostly self-conscious displays of a spectacular vocabulary and sentence/style shuffling skills.
This is Post Modern writing(?) Seems to me it's a stream of consciousness roaring through alota Hey Look At Me rapids. I miss writing where the words rise to convey ideas that tie together to mean something.That something is usually a story.Or story concept.
Sure I like unique adjectives ("gassy old men")and picturesque verbs ("leaning into the next century").
But such words are alot better when conveying/dramatizing/empowering an Idea.UNDERWEAR has elegant, engaging descriptions of nothing. It meanders nowhere special while offering tasty tidbits along the way. Tasty but empty, missing intellectual or emotional nutrition, doing little to build a satisfying story.
Now I'm gonna go read another 500 or so pages. But I fear all I'll get is alota White Noise, which seems DeLillo's ploy.(A nod to
DeLillo's earlier novel WHITE NOISE. I reviewed it and said about the same things about that big white cloud of nothingness.) Oops... Above, I mis-named UNDERWORLD. I know what happened: I was thinking of a line pages back: "Underwear. Everything, suddenly, is underwear," he said. "Tell me what it means." (P.260) The questioned never answers...
So, what? Does it mean? UNDERWORLD is like alot of pop songs. Maybe you can sing the first line, but the rest of the lyrics escape you because, versus the melody, they're inconsequential. Look for my next review; maybe I'll get UNDERWORLD in the next 500 and some pages... Dooby-dooby-do, da-da-da, er, de-de... Ah, bada-
ping... Um... (Ah, that's what underwear means...)
Rating:
Summary: Savor the prologue, trash the rest
Review: On a flight to Libya back in 96, my friend Steve handed me a copy of Harper's. Read this, he said, it's about the best you'll ever read. It was, of course, DeLillo's glorious story "Pafko at the Wall". Later, here it is as the prologue to some of the most verbose, long-winded, meandering drivel of recent years (apart from Salman Rushdie, natch). Does DeLillo even have an editor these days ? Anyway, if you can't get a back issue from Harper's, here's my tip: Borrow the book, photocopy the prologue and treasure it again and again at your leisure.
Rating:
Summary: who cares
Review: I read this book, because it was recommended by a friend. After reading the opening story about the "Shot Heard Round the World", I was prepared for an amazing book. But to my disappointment, it turned out to be boring and convoluted. I get was this book is about--a deconstructive look at the American psyche during the cold war period. It is a loosely tied together set of stories--glimpses into people's lives really--linked by the number 13, a baseball, nuclear war and garbage. But who cares? For all of the author's witty prose and random occurences, the book does not do what it should--tell a story. The author could have made the book 400 pages or so and done the same thing. Instead, he gets too caught up in his deconstructionist experiment. Don't read it unless you have a lot of patience and time on your hands.
Rating: 
Summary: More promise than bite.
Review: Any American will fall for the first chapter of this book. The scene of the Polo Grounds, the mix of dead icons and working stiffs, everything is brilliant. And then the idea of tracking down the ball is intriguing. But for me it never all came together. Some story lines never led anywhere and others were just beat to death. The book is either 300 pages too long or 200 pages too short.
Rating:
Summary: BRILLIANT
Review: DeLillo may strech his prose at times, but it is some excellant prose. This was for me a page turner in the truest sense. DeLillo uncovers a whole world from baseball to the Cold War to human relationships to Italian-America to bomb testing. The book's primary weakness is its lenghth, but the does not mean that DeLillo was not able to fill out the pages. Overall a marvelous book, and a very good (and startling) ending about the effects of nuclear activity and the abuse of our youngest citizens.
Rating:
Summary: Masterful !
Review: Quite simply Mr. Delillo has cut ot a niche in the literay world with this book alone. His use of metaphor and epigramatic paragraphs is a testament to his magisterial talent. Some search for history and plot and character development in this magnum opus ...well these tone deaf readers will come away disappointed for Delillo writes English prose in a magnificent poetic style which surely isn't for all ....only those who love ....truly love language for languages sake will find this book to be as beautiful as i did ..there are aspects of this work that stand on their own as essays and even short stories. If one is searching for a linear history of the cold war or a social history of the last 5 decades of the last century don't read this book ...but if one wants to grasp the poetry of this era and its language from Lenny Bruce to J.Edgar Hoover buy it read it and tell a friend.Future generations will be taught this book in colleges for many years to come i predict.
Rating:
Summary: vastly overhyped...
Review: This book suffers from the worst aspects of post-modern stories (namely, an autofellative narcissism) without any of its good asepcts (any sort of witty irreverence). "Underworld" is compulsively obsessed and in love with its own structure. "Look at me! I'm over 800 pages long! I go from Phoenix to Kahzakstan. I'm told chronologically backwards! Aren't I special?" DeLillo often inserts some object in one scene (e.g. orange juice or a picture of Jane Mansfield) just to have it deliberately pop up in the next scene, which takes place five years before. Isn't that clever? The structure is impressive, but it doesn't make up for the forced writing style or forgettable characters. Nominally the plot is about some guy who might have committed a murder in the past. I guess. DeLillo seems as apathetic to the plot as I was. Admittedly, there were a couple of scenes that I enjoyed like the Lenny Bruce monologues or the scene involving the Zapruder footage. But it's hardly worth slogging through this book to find them. The much-praised opening scene, describing Bobby Thompson's famous "Shot Heard 'Round the World" and featuring J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason, and Frank Sinatra, among other people, chatting in the stands was an overly conscious attempt at being "writterly." Its solemnity was laughable. "Look at me! I'm talking about Race and Culture in Cold War America! Am I not a Great American Novel?" Underworld, you're no Moby Dick. You're not even a Moderately Interesting American Novel.
Rating:
Summary: UH, WHAT WAS THE BOOK ABOUT AGAIN?
Review: Works of art that are considered masterpieces now were greeted with bewilderment when they first appeared. For example, Moby Dick by Melville or Leaves of Grass by Whitman, or even the paintings of Van Gogh. Critics reacted negatively or maintained a position of neutrality about their worth. It seems that they had to wait for the works to gain an audience. I just finished reading Underworld and I really don't know what to make of it. The novel is so winding and vague and long that i dont remember half of the content. It seems like the parts that really stand out to me are the beginning and the whimpering end. I mean if you're going to attempt to write the equivalent of War and Peace for the nuclear age, you had better be a master of the long form novel. Delillo's style is suited more for shorter works. I don't know why I kept reading this book until the end. Probably because its variety and hopping back and forth in time did not let me get into a rut of boredom. There are 3 running themes or symbols throughout the book. The first is the baseball, the shot heard round the world, which is grabbed by Joseph Cotter, a young black kid. He is for all practical purposes the first cause from which the novel evolves. The baseball seems to encapsulate a moment of innocence and a longing for childhood and simpler times as a variety of characters quest for it or possess it. Nick Shays, the main character, is its last owner, and to him in symbolizes freedom and a time in his life when he did "live", without being sucked into a job he doesn't care about and all the responsibilities of the american dream. The second theme is that of the shadow of fear cast by the possibility of nuclear war. The characters use the cold war as a means of comfort. They are able to paint the world in terms of black and white: USA vs. USSR. As the characters reach the 90's there is a sense of loss because some of them have anchored their belief systems on this war that no longer exists. The last symbol that comes up a lot is the subject of waste. We have refuse, we have nuclear waste, we have organically made feces. The authors criticism of wasteful americans is completely in the foreground. Dump sites are treated as views of epic landscapes. Genetic freaks caused by nuclear radiation are described in terms of beauty. As for characters and plot, they're practically non-existent thanks to the jumbled mess that is this book. I admire Delillo for what he attempted here but his talents do not lie in making epic productions. His genius lies in the small scale.
Rating:
Summary: Delillo's Masterpiece To Date
Review: There certainly was a lot of literary hype surrounding this novel when it was published and I'm here to tell you that this enormous book lives up to it. Delillo, in my humble opinion, is the greatest American writer writing today (at least that I've ran across) and the "Underworld" is the best by him that I've read (Libra and White Noise). The opening scene of the 1951 Giants/Dodger's playoff game with Robbie Thompson's "shot heard around the world" is a cornucopia of characters and a brilliant snapshot of that time and that place. It quite simply is some of the best writing I've read. The novel traces the history of the cold war through its effect on a variety of characters all with ownership of the Thompson Homerun baseball in common. Some of the memorable moments are the Texas Highway Killer, a lengthy discourse on garbage (it really made me think in depth about the subject of something we discard and would rather forget about), and the cold war's effect on people's personal lives (something I only caught the tail end of). The only detractor from the work was the reverse chronological telling of the story, though a bold attempt, tends to lessen the impact of the characters' stories and the inevitable march of history. To get a good feel for the best in modern fiction, read the Underworld. It will definitely be worth your time. I read it as part of the Brother's Book Club (BBC) and it generated great in-depth discussions and has been my favorite to date.
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