Rating: 
Summary: GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
Review: DeLillo has been getting better with each novel, and this is no exception. His examination of the last 50 years in American culture is as deep as it is broad. Whether he's writing about baseball, the Bronx, or Bruce (Lenny) DeLillo makes the story resonate with the vast American story. Underworld is a masterpiece--one of the great works of the 20th century. The language is beautiful, and the author has defined what it means to have lived in America. This novel fulfills the promises he made with White Noise, Libra, and Mao II.
Rating: 
Summary: Some Great Bits, But Too Much Chaff...
Review: Any book that attempts to encapsulate the Cold War, post-WWII, American experience is destined to be a long, long read. The problem is that it's just tough to keep up good writing for 800+ pages, and while certain vignettes were really interesting and absorbing, others weren't. The prologue--a set piece at the famous 1951 "shot heard round the world" Giants-Dodgers playoff game--is sheer genius, working in a young black truant, J. Edgar Hoover, Sinatra, Gleason, and news of the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb test. Overall though, there were just too many balls in the air, and it was a bit abstract at times for me.
Rating:
Summary: Good Writing - Tedious Reading
Review: I love Don DeLillo's writing. He is one of the best. This story, however, never caught on with me so I found getting through the 800 some pages tedious.
Rating:
Summary: Patience and faith, dear reader....
Review: Read this masterwork twice, first as a literary chronicle of the last half of "America's Century" and then as a literal chunk of Americana per se, that is, as our era's own "Huck Finn." At the tale's onset, a heroic home-run ball becomes the artifact that propels the reader through the psychodrama that has been our postmodern experience, a era shaped largely by the other event that October day in 1951: the commie detonation of an A-bomb. The effects of both "shots heard round the world " become the central interlocking theses of Nick and Klara's odyssey, one often rendered grotesquely obsessive in both tone and content by the manic consumerism of our electronically interwoven lives and its natural consequence: waste production. If a thematic Mississippi River flows here, it is waste management -- of both the actual and metaphysical sort. As such, on one level, the underworld revealed is the unseen industrial plumbing that ingests spent plutonium fuel rods, toxic trash, assorted toxic biohazards, and wayward barges of Fishkill Island refuse. Yet, on another level, the underworld is the collective cognitive wiring capable of culturally assimilating abandoned B-52's -- the ultimate weapons of mass destruction -- into a desert "art installation," or of morphing the appalling Bronx ghetto graffiti into haute showcases splashed across the pages of "Art in America." Managing all varieties of our own flotsam and jetsam has always been -- and will always be -- the primary cultural catalyst of the human condition and progression. Delillo's narrative strategy requires both patience and faith from the reader since often few overt cues about speakers and situations are given until well into pages of dialogue. This stylistic device becomes problematic because the content spans decades and continents in this freely-associated socio-cultural panorama of America's last fifty years. Along the way, we are treated to acute portrayals of many personalities, among them J. Edgar Hoover and Lenny Bruce with his memorable riffs of "We're all gonna die!" punctuating his stand-up routine. Stitching this complex patchwork together is the sense that, in this modern era, all is as eternal -- or as ephemeral -- as an endlessly looping videotape of an apparent existence where, in the final chapters, " Everything is everywhere all the time." This ultimate modernity is counterbalanced by the image of the other universal in the human experience: Bruegel's "The Triumph of Death." That we see this allegorical painting surrealistically through the fastidiously fairy-esque consciousness of Hoover is a narrative trick only Delillo could successfully pull off. And does he ever.... I hope this review doesn't contribute to this grand work's being doomed to the "was supposed to but didn't read" stack of titles growing ever-taller in our video-driven culture. "Underworld" is certainly no beach read, but then neither was Huck -- and that title has had fairly good successes over the years.
Rating: 
Summary: Ick.
Review: A semi-pretentious friend of mine recommended this book to me. I should have seen it coming. Tried to read it, got through about three hundred pages, and still mourn the time I wasted trying (as well as the tree that gave its life for the printing)... This is book is boring in an "epic" sense of the word. And I don't just that "it didn't entertain me". I mean that it's a monument of sterile self-indulgence, vacant pretention, and pathological wordiness. Somehow I can't help but see it as a symbol of the excesses of our times: 800 pages about nothing, and people praise it. You might like it, but don't say you weren't warned.
Rating:
Summary: Two years ago and I still remember it
Review: I read this book in '98 and I still remember it so well. I have recommended it to 5 or 6 people and they couldn't get through it. Too big and bulky or whatever. But I just fell into the writing and the way he wove a tale of different lives into the basket of the 20th century. He is truly a gifted writer and I'm gonna pick this book back up and fall in love all over again!
Rating: 
Summary: much ado about nothing
Review: I can't believe i wasted hours of my time on this "masterpiece". Dellilo strives at every oportunity to conjure the most complicated dribble of words imaginable. His imagery is way too verbose and he is obviously trying too hard. The storyline is the most disjointed one i have every known. It seems to be building up to some over-arching climax but fails miserably in its execution. As other reviewers have pointed out, there is no "main" character that emerges. The story required an enduring, likeable character to help us through the mess. It is obvious that Dellilo is a brilliant exponent of the English language. However, with Underworld he has intentionally sought to write a masterpiece. It doesn't have the raw elements required to emerge as a classic. At best, mediocre
Rating:
Summary: Postmodern optimism
Review: Underworld is certainly not a novel to be taken lightly. Thematically and stylistically, it is undoubtably vast and astonishingly varied, there are literally dozens of characters, and with these characters come dozens of voices. Delillo alternates between vastly different times, geographies, voices, and even points of view (whole swaths of the novel are in first person, other parts are not), and in doing so it seems to me that he ultimately achieves a structure parallel to the very American experience that he wants to evoke: diverse, fragmented, immense, and frankly rather heroic. To search for an entirely coherent plotline throughout is to miss the fun of finding the hidden connections between distant times and places (connections which become one theme of the novel) and is also a rather futile attempt to read a book on terms that are not its own. Reading Underworld ought to be an experience, not a chore, and rather than search for some formal order that is neither extant nor desirable, one should simply sit back, relax, and enjoy Delillo's wonderful ear for poetry and speech. That being said, I would like to take issue with a reviewer below who purports that Underworld is the result of Delillo thematically plagiarising his own earlier work, White Noise. While White Noise can, in many regards, be read as an overture to Underworld, it is after all a highly individual novel, a novel about the inadequacy of language in the face of death, and about the futility of attempting to co-opt history for personal perspective. Underworld is grander in scope and vision: and while it, too, is ultimately concerned with the inadequacy of human speech and interaction, it paints the conflicts between language, death, and history across a much broader canvas. It is THE postmodern meditation on the inherent fallacy of linguistic dichotomies. Against the background of the cold war, or two superpowers, of "Us and Them," Delillo attempts (and I believe, succeeds) to deconstruct, time after time, the dualities that we create to preserve and assure our own sense of identity. He builds, for individuals as well as for entire nations, a whole interlocking set of "Us and Them" ideals, and he continually subverts them, until ultimately the Cold War is over, the greatest dichotomy collapses, history overcomes the language's power to obscure, and there is the final word of the book . . . And of course, there is only one way to discover what that is.
Rating:
Summary: Almost there
Review: Underworld is almost a masterpiece. It is a very good piece of writing, but it lacks in character. It is a work which is almost like the nightmare of the Bruegel painting , and it is a very visual book, from garbage to mushroom clouds to artworks based upon garbage. An interesting book to study if one bothers to let the mind roam the scenes. However, there are, for me, glitches, especially with the way the central female character, Klara Sax, is drawn.
Rating:
Summary: Astonishing
Review: I read Underworld in the summer it came out in paperback. I recommended it to all my friends, often e-mailing them long beautiful passages from the book. None of them read it. The funniest thing said by one of them who bought it, and tried to read it, was "At about midway through the book, I thought I was starting to go backwards." He probably hasn't finished it. Even the best of us give up. So Underworld isn't for every reader; if you're sensibility is already postmodern, or almost there, then you'll savor DeLillo's takes on everything from the self-reflexive character of the Kennedy assassination footage to his meditations on the vitality of site-specific artworks. Past that the text is gorgeously written and continually inventive. My favorite section: the passages describing the increasing stench of Marvin's bowel movements as he and his wife journey deeper into communist country. Just hilarious.
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