Rating: 
Summary: Grand themes
Review: This book is beautifully written, has many grand themes and ideas yet fell SEVERELY short in terms of character development, plot, and narrative drive. Certainly makes one think but the characters that hold it together are boring.
Rating: 
Summary: Not so great
Review: I've had this book for over two months now and I'm still in page 300. And I read quite a lot and quite fast. Yes, this book is beautifully written, some could say it is an 800 page long poem. But there's little story, a fractured narrative and unintresting characters. This is a prime example of literary masturbation. All style and no substance.
Rating: 
Summary: Overwrought and Undergood
Review: The "editorial review" above, called the writer's "super-omniscient" (ha!) prologue "an absolutely thrilling literary moment." I would call it a highly contrived, glaringly self-conscious, cliched, and very false-feeling embarrassment. In fact what I read of the book (and I'm not at all ashamed to admit that I did not read all of it: after all, it is laughably obvious from vague comments like "DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life" that even the book's most enthusiastic supporters did not read all of it), what I did read of the book, is actually even more contrived, self-conscious, and dedicated to espousing the same old conventions than the "editorial review" I have been quoting from.Let us read the very last paragraph, which is composed of a single sentence which itself is a single word: "Peace." And so we see that this can only be yet another tired old ex-hippie's sad attempt to justify his own failed existence. If you are an ex-hippie, too, perhaps this reiteration of your 30-year-old mantra will, after over 800 pages of tedium, inspire in you the intended feeling of melancholy nostalgia and you will be moved. I wasn't. "Super-omniscient"? No: super-boring, and, literally, unreadable.
Rating:
Summary: As a former fan of DeLillo's
Review: I was very disappointed in this effort. The opening bit about Bobby Thompson's homerun bored me to absolute tears. It was cliche-driven, to say the least. Nothing new there. I waded through hundreds of pages before I found anything to really hold my interest, and by that time I'd determined that it just wasn't worth it. Now I have to go back and read Libra and White Noise to make sure I wasn't dreaming when I read those books and thought they were great.
Rating: 
Summary: An author accomplished
Review: Not a book to forget, ordained and subtle, a pearl of linguistic marvels. A very personal impression of mine -I consider it a fact- serveral stories entwined in a mighty effacing chaos, some delirius charecterization and some modest vulgarism. Never been to America, but if this were a framing of american society it couldn't have been done better. Masterpieces have always caused me abandonment and recluse, obeying this Barometer I'd call it freaking. Every reprsentation of caste and/or time period in this book seems utterly realistic for an uncanny teenager like myself, it might be right,it might be not. The critisisms are not as abundently delivered as in White Noise yet He seems to have been occupied with america's uncouthness and revolutionary shallowness in a way as obssesive and mocking as I have never observed before. A must be read
Rating: 
Summary: i have to agree with the consensus, it's really not for ever
Review: -which is not a bad thing. some people enjoy its framework, others don't. nothing more. a book that really requires your attention most importantly your thoughts inbetween the times you're actually reading it. otherwise you'll immerse yourself into a lost world of american history's not so newsbreaking yet highly interesting (fictional) events. yet even with so much information packed into the book it manages itself to wrap itself around one central theme in the end - peace.
Rating:
Summary: As intimate as an 800-page American epic can be
Review: Don DeLillo has developed a voice which speaks more deftly on the evolving state of American cultural identity than any in modern literature. He used it to provide depth and hyperawareness to a range of interrelated characters teetering on the edge of an emotional breakdown. From the tired overhyped star in Great Jones Street, the self-obsessed writer in Mao II, to the self-doubting/death-obsessed professor in White Noise, DeLillo explored the effects of mass culture, industrialization, and the reciprocal developments thereof through each character. However, the sphere in which he worked -- cold war America -- remained a hinted-to paradigm only, but loomed as a landscape a reader knew had been painted to the most minute detail in the author's head. Underworld is the result of the author's acknowledgement of that reader awareness. Knowing he had built a fan base, it's almost as if DeLillo was fulfilling a promise to produce the epic around which the remainder of his work would revolve. Accordingly, any DeLillo admirer must tackle the 800-plus page dinosaur, accepting the task it truly is. I'm heartened to learn that other readers had similar experiences to the one I had with the book. While I finished the book last week -- early April 2001 -- I must confess it has sat on the various bedside tables of my life for nearly three years. I took the book from my father's shelf, after he had declared it something he had no interest in reading. "It's my life in there. Why would I want to read about my life?" Considering his usual fare includes Tom Clancy and Stephen Coontz, I accepted this as an endorsement. However, it took me four separate runs-through of the prologue before I continued on into the desert "Long Tall Sally" scene. Again, a month later, that foray was likewise aborted. The book was returned to my bookcase, only to be re-removed once I packed and unpacked my library in my latest home, more than a year ago. Again, it stared at me, a symbol of my literary fears and all left incomplete. Determined to see it all the way through, I started on again, from the Polo Grounds experience of Cotter Martin. That attempt finally drew complete, despite a few lagging points (the 1980s narrative of Bronzini's sad existence in the Bronx and Matt Shay's nuclear engineer lifestyle in the 1970s, in particular). The one complaint, which runs contrary to my acceptance of DeLillo the way he is, concerns the linear narrative of the ball. Like a candle burning from both ends, the reader is led to believe some conclusion is imminent -- that at some point, the New Jersey collector guy will find Chucky Fairbanks and learn what the reader knows happened in those fateful hours after Bobby Thompson won the pennant for the Giants. The narrative serves as the backbone of the entire novel, so it's incomplete rendering by book's end is a bit of a let-down, or more accurately, a pain to all readers hanging on the edge of resolution. The novel succeeds in its promise. The impact of the USA solo hegemony is only slowly revealing itself. The one area most blaringly obvious to those of us born and reared into some period of the Cold War is its seeming irrelevance in the minds of those born since its conclusion. As a result, a book like Underworld stands as, perhaps a cryptic, but nonetheless vital testament to the individual lives chiseled out of the landscape of post-WWII America.
Rating:
Summary: DeLillo's 20th Century Big-Bang Theory
Review: I am comforted by the fact that so many other readers seemed to have the same experience with this book as I did. I started the book only to give up around 150 pages into it and put it away for a month or so before diving in again. Even when I began the novel in earnest, determined to fight my way through it, it was a slow, deliberate and tedious process. At times, it was almost like a chore. But, then again, going back to when I first read Faulkner's ABSALOM, ABSALOM!, I always thought that the more challenging a novel is, the more rewarding it seems to be in the end. UNDERWORLD is such a novel. (And, don't worry, UNDERWORLD isn't nearly as intimidating as ABSALOM, ABSALOM!) UNDERWORLD is an ambitious, sprawling, and fearless work. It's is DeLillo's cultural big-bang theory with the bang here being Bobby Thompson's improbable pennant-winning home run in 1951. Civilization unravels even as it accelerates from that point. It is a civilization rising out of the garbage created by its own progress. DeLillo captures it all with a hundred tiny little stories about bombs, waste, baseball, junkies, street artists, Lenny Bruce, and killers turned media stars. It is a landscape dotted with conspiracies about the number 13, the census, Greenland, dollar bills, and Gorbachev's birthmark. All but a couple of DeLillo's characters in UNDERWORLD are shallow, shadowy figures we see only in passing and we barely get to know. Normally that hurts a novel but it serves a purpose here as the characters themselves are almost not as important as the civilization, the culture, and the world around them they serve to reflect. The book is almost worth buying simply for the prologue alone. Razor sharp and colorful, DeLillo's telling of Thompson's home run is magnificent and entertaining, covering the game from every aspect imaginable--from the players on the field to a group in the crowd that includes Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover to the radio listeners on rooftops throughout New York City to the young boy who skipped school for the event, only to wind up with Thompson's home run ball in his hands. It is a dazzling account. From there, the book begins to ramble (well, it IS over 800 pages long!) and most of the sections aren't nearly as fascinating or as beautifully steamlined as the prologue. But the individual sections, when pieced together, do manage to form an impression on a much larger and more important scale. Its imagery, beauty, ambition, and sheer scope will reward those of you who are patient enough to watch all of the pieces fit together and let the story unfold before you. When it's finished, I promise you, UNDERWORLD will leave you breathless.
Rating:
Summary: unreadable
Review: I like books. I like books a lot. I have been known to read manuals for heating systems if nothing else is to hand. This said I don't think my critical faculties have suffered and I found "Underworld" completely unreadable. I was disappointed and felt gulled by the glowing reviews on the cover which claimed that it was the best book of the century etc. Unconvinced that I was right in the face of such venerable opposition I lent the mostly unread book to several friends who also found it utterly unreadable. I don't know- maybe you have to be American or at least a baseball fan? A horrible book.
Rating:
Summary: I Really, Really, Like this Book
Review: I'll tell you. It's to do with the bit where the teenage kid wanks off with Marigolds while his mum makes Jello's downstairs, and the bit where the ad agency execs spring out from history; loud and vulgar. I wasn't too keen on the opening chapter, just the line that describes Cotter jumping the turnstiles. The book is long, too long, but the two chapters I mentioned fit almost exactly into the middle, forming the apex of a trajectory. DeLillo seems to be exploring, like an astronaut, the crack of the bat and ball at the start announcing his takeoff, the multitude of situations he describes are no more a 'plot' than poems are. He is moving, fast, hard, working like a dog for us, so that we can see as far and as wide as he can as he accompanies the baseball through darkening skies. He is a genius. This book is his recognition of such, and a gift to us as part of that acknowledgement. Who can criticize this book? No-one. Who can criticize it as a story? Anyone who can read... :) The book climbs and climbs from the stadium, becoming America itself, becoming the reflection it casts in the still waters of our supposed peacetime. The book explores on either side of the mirror, stretches out it's hands and grabs at the paradox of peace itself in a world which might not even lay foundation enough for such an ideal. It explores things that probably the author and ourselves are not even interested in, not concerned with. It does this as a duty to it's own agonising ability to see, because to do otherwise would be to bed down with ignorance, to cheat us all of what we are capable of seeing if we just rouse ourselves from introspection. And here it is. The kid, wanking. In the middle. The collapse of it all, Jello becoming art and art dying on Warhols bones just as his lips utter our fate with a smile lent by the Mona Lisa. The media mushrooming in the empty spaces and vacillations of a nation with nowhere left to go. The only thing this book seems remiss in not inspecting is the moon landing. It snaps away in terror once the rockets go up, Sputnik usurping a livable reality, leaving us to drown in cheap sci fi as it draws a line way, way above our heads, beyond our dreams and aspirations. The rockets go up and the artists turn to television, two cars, black and white, claiming their first victims among billions on the airwaves and highways of the ultimate society. The state turning rotten in a young mans retarded grasp. The fall of America, and by extension our fall. This book is not a story to be worried at by people who want a story, who want flowers to garland their intellectual palsy. This book shows humanity, at a time where we can see it clearest, in the crystal clear stark daylight of a century at once illuminated by it's own brilliance and engulfed by it. It has nothing to say about sport either, it just shows cavemen with sticks, striking poses against a backdrop that none of us can claim to belong to anymore, it shows men drinking and trying to understand, trying to live; a heroism so bleak as to hurt, a hurt our achievements can't lie to. So. Yeah, on reflection this might just be the greatest book ever written! And anyone who says otherwise can pass the Marigolds!
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