Rating: 
Summary: the best
Review: I have read most of delillo's work, and this is the best of the best.
Rating:
Summary: Halflife of a Century
Review: If there is a central idea in Don DeLillo's Underworld, it is that the center of our lives change as a matter of living them. This is brought home to us in the closing pages in the voice of one of the novel's main characters, Nick Shay, born Nick Costanza: "I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless 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's longing is shared in various ways by most of the other characters in DeLillo's epic, and the list of characters is as rich and varied as the canvasses upon which DeLillo paints their action. DeLillo initially suggests a baseball is the center of the book. Not just any baseball, but the baseball that Bobby Thomson hit into the stands at the Polo Grounds on October 3rd, 1951 to carry his New York Giants over the rival Brooklyn Dodgers to win the National league pennant. We are reminded from time to time that Thomson's "shot heard 'round the world" provided the impetus that got things going. But another event of the same day is reported to us in the character of J. Edgar Hoover, who is informed of Russia's first Nuclear test by an aide while he watches the historic game with Toots Shor, Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra. The events are irrevocably twinned when it is pointed out that the size of the plutonium core of the bomb is the size of a baseball. Thus from the first pages, the bomb and the ball walk a winding path back and forth through the last fifty years of the twentieth century. Neither of them are ever very far out of sight. They are referenced through a building occupied by a peripheral character many years earlier; Nick Shay's job, which is essentially a garbage collector; a sailor we never meet leaving a garbage scow in Vancouver, or the bombardier who gets "x-ray eyes" at the moment of a test detonation. Finally for him, the world is truly color blind. It is the essence of Underworld, and DeLillo's writing in general, that the smallest atom of a phrase or thought conveys reams so that we only get the edges directly, but the core is made entirely clear. From time to time DeLillo gives us an oblique peek at history. The tension of the Cuban missile crisis is revealed through the dark monologues of Lenny Bruce as we follow him through a wild week from Los Angeles to Miami to San Francisco and Chicago as he tells us repeatedly "we're all gonna die!" Of course this is not done in a strictly sequential fashion. In between his shows, we travel back and forth through the fifties and the sixties catching up with, or filling in some of the blanks on familiar characters and meeting new ones, some of whom will fade with the flash of the bomb after helping us follow the bouncing ball which remains ever-elusive, even as Nick, a one time Brooklyn Dodger fan, holds it for desperate comfort in the middle of an Arizona night. In some sense, Underworld is the new age model of the atom. Each of its many characters are as electrons at various energy levels. We witness Nick's intensely defining moment in adolescence as well as his ennui in what has been traditionally depicted as success. Klara Sax finds her defining intensity in her sixties as an artist after surviving an unremarkable marriage in Brooklyn. Her husband, on the other hand lives an ever intense internal life that has little to do with the physical world. This ultimately keeps him remote from everyone except Nick's younger brother, an autistic chess prodigy. Such is the nature of the critical mass that DeLillo is building. The crossings of the pathways that the major characters follow create a causal chain reaction that propels us to the brink of the current century, even as the questions of the last one go unanswered. DeLillo leaves us with yet another intriguing question as he opens the millennial door... "is the internet a miracle?" The Internet. The Bomb. Aids. Art. Graffiti. Advertising. Relationships. The way they talk in Brooklyn. In Underworld, Don DeLillo builds a shelter large enough to hold them all.
Rating:
Summary: I do not like Delillo, but the book was superb
Review: I hesitated to start on this book because I was not a great fan of DD. Certainly the over the top pretentiousness and sophomoric concepts of wit that had turned me off from him in the past were there, but despite all this the book is absolutely phenomenal. The themes and characters carry perfectly those characteristics of DD's writing which had annoyed me so much before. This is really one of the best books I have read in years, insightful, brilliant writing. An excellent cultural survey into the good and bad in the post war world.
Rating:
Summary: Big books are back
Review: Big books have quickly become passe in literary circles as everyone is too sensitive of speaking for others and a pervasive fear of "master narratives" which might exclude marginal voices and perspectives. Don Delillo takes up the challenge and, I think, hits a home run. This book isn't perfect, but it is filled with so much insight into contemporary pop/urban/postmodern culture that I kept turning the pages with my jaw hanging. Delillo has the gift to make familiar things look strange and to see contemporary culture with a fresh eye. The narrative is incredibly sophisticated, as it jumps from character to character. At times, the narrative seems to be following the mythic home run ball that one of the characters is searching for. The one criticism I cannot tolerate of Delillo's work is that he doesn't write full "three-dimensional characters" involved in tightly written plots and narratives which build to a climax, ala John Irving and Charles Dickens. Delillo can't be expected to write novels like Dickens because he's not writing about the 19th century! The shape and flow of Delillo's narratives seem more akin to the movies and television, and the cool sheen of his language is a more honest representation of our superficial times.
Rating:
Summary: Epic 'flawed masterpiece'
Review: I won't attempt any kind of meaningful literary criticism, you can find that in other reviews (beware, it is obvious many of the published reviewers have not read the whole book) and comments, and I'm not up to it. But I will try to explain what the book is. This is the story of America's past 50 years, told from a unique perspective (kind of like a hyperactive eye of God with a 5 minute attention span). This results in a series of interconnected short stories travelling back and forth in time, connected by ephemera (a baseball, garbage, TV shows, and the degrees of separation of all the characters). The story is discovered by tracing these connections, which are made by the actions of the characters (the story is not really about the characters, but about explaining the effects of different forces on their lives). The book switches between styles frequently. The most disturbing thing many people may find are the switches between first and third person. However, people accept these changes in viewpoint in films... Next is the repetition. However this serves to illuminate the connections between the characters' experiences, and also help the jog the reader's memory to something that happened 300 pages ago. Don't be put off by the change in style after the relatively accessible and electric first chapter, either. Making it to the end of this book is difficult, because there is barely a sentence that does not serve to illuminate the story in a way that makes you stop and think. But if you do, it should make you think differently about life, what more can you ask for? Perhaps the most impressive feature of this book is that the author managed to keep it coherent despite its massive size and scope, finally resolving all of the interconnected sequences of events spawned in the first chapter. It is a demonstration of rare talent.
Rating: 
Summary: A Giant Waste of Time
Review: Out of respect for some of my fellow reviewers who absolutely loved this book, and due to an excellent Prologue and a few occasional flashes of brilliance, I am giving DeLillo's epic novel about garbage a fairly generous 2 stars. I also love the cover. However, I have to honestly say that reading this book to its completion was the most laborious and unrewarding reading experience I can remember since I suffered through Thomas Pynchon's V. The book begins at the famous one game playoff between the Dodgers and the Giants, a la "Shot Heard Round the World" fame, and at the game there are wonderful cameos by Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, and an over-indulgent Jackie Gleason who hurls all over Sinatra's shoes as Bobby Richardson hits the famous longball. DeLillo was apparently fascinated by the coincidence that the Russians first detonated a nuclear weapon on the same day. He sets in motion a mosaic of seemingly unrelated occurences over the next 30 years, tied together at times by the actual baseball hit by Richardson to propel the Giants to the pennant. The theme of the novel is garbage, literally, as in waste management and toxic containment. There are occasional brilliant passages, like the Lenny Bruce monologues and the story of the baseball immediately after the game, as the young turnstile-jumper who found it brings it home to his scheming dad. However there is simply too much that doesn't go anywhere. Who is the mysterious highway killer, and what does it have to do with anything? Maybe on rereading the novel starts revealing its secrets, but I frankly haven't the energy. Life is too short. One reviewer said forget trying to piece it together as a whole, instead look for individual "epiphanies" on individual pages. I thought that's what poetry and short stories were for. I'll pass thanks.
Rating:
Summary: DeLillo grows complacent
Review: DeLillo is a great living writer, but, like many great writers, he seems to have gotten narcisstic and complacent in his late (successful) age. Ah yes, DeLillo sold a movie option on this book. It's great that he's become successful, but it seems that he, as a writer, is no longer running scared -- is no longer chasing anything, nor being chased. This book is monumentally self-indulgent, and attempts to tackle everything. As we all know, such books usually end up tackling nothing. The opening scene is great, and a couple of moments later in the book are also great, but it doesn't have that sizzling sharpness of the other DeLillo novels I've read. I am a little bit of a history buff, but perhaps not enough so: all the historical cameos grew boring after a while. Like history itself, this novel is long, and not long in a tongue-in-cheek Laurence Sterne "I am wasting your time, dear reader!" kind of way, but in a self important DeLilloesque "listen to me telling this story because I am the cleverest writer in the world" way. This is still a better book than most pop books on the shelves today, but doesn't deliver what earlier DeLillo novels delivered. Perhaps his next one will be better.
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: You are lucky, brother/sister
Review: This is a big book. That's good, because the more DeLillo, the better. Give us all you can, Don. My favorite lines are from a scene where a TV anchorwoman is interviewing the Texas highway killer on the phone on live TV. "Why are you committing these murders?" "Lets just say it's a nice seasonal day where I'm located here, with scattered clouds, and if you want to take that as a hint at my location, then take it as a hint, and if this is all a game, then take it as a game." Total perverse humor like this is typical of DeLillo. Underworld has many diverse parts. It's the good stuff. Shall we say something doesn't belong? Shall he exclude certain realities? No. DeLillo's character is that of the author. Even though he is one man, one man's time may be complex enough to include stories of seemingly unrelated types. He is showing us how much actually goes through the mind of a being. He is showing how much can come from a style, a way of seeing. His previous books are so good that to reach their levels of perfection is probably not possible. But that's OK. They already reached those levels. Now he's free to do the new. He has somehow learned to lock on to creative power that produces scene after scene of abnormal, interesting, intense material. Either he is drawing from ultra-rich experience, or he is playing with an imagination that can truly, as Mike Smith says, "explore the world in ways most writers can't even dream of." Begin with any of his books, especially Ratner's Star. If your mind is structured anything like mine, you will read them all, again and again, until you can see no longer.
Rating: 
Summary: Underworld works well---as a DOORSTOP!
Review: I'd been meaning to tackle one of Delillo's books for a while, hearing good things about him, one of the great modern American novelists, etc. I certainly don't pretend to be a writer, or even a literary critic, however, it would seem that if a novel doesn't move the reader then it's failed. I wish I could say that Underworld hadn't moved me, but it did--I was enraged at myself for wasting the time to finish all 800 odd pages. Sure there were overarching themes--the Cold War, how novel--and some character development but done with such self-consciousness I couldn't bring myself to care. Even Delillo's "complex" literary techniques are flat--superomniscient--PLEASE! So, what do you get after 800 pages of this? Nothing. Delillo's talent is as thin as Donald Trump's combover.
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