UNDERWORLD

Rating:
Summary: A Disappointing Offering from a Good Writer
Review: "Underworld" is the type of novel that frustrates me. This is because DeLillo is a good writer and the ideas about which he writes are great, yet somehow he manages to create a mediocre work of fiction. I think that he tried to make his canvass too large and as a consequence DeLillo has created a novel that has little cohesiveness. The disparate characters and settings are united under the umbrella of the Cold War, but these sketches of prose and ideas never gel into a novel nor into a true story. I understand that DeLillo writes in a "post-modern" genre, more or less, yet a novel full of seemingly disconnected events still needs to have threads of story connecting them, however tiny these threads may be. As a series of vignettes or a colletion of shortstories it may have worked, but as a novel, it is too long and just doesn't work.

Rating:
Summary: An intriguing, annoying, confusing, addicting masterpiece.
Review: After putting the book down five times, renewing it at the library three times, vowing to forget it, and falling in love with it, I finished the book.
My first feeling was of accomplishment, which quickly faded to a sense of loss. I no longer had the incredibly complex myriad of seemingly unrelated vignettes to piece together into a comprehensible story.

I kept waiting for a final chapter in which all of the characters came together, much like the final drawing room scene in Agatha Christe novel where the mystery is solved and the murderer revealed. I wanted a pink ribbon to tie around the plot, with every character accounted for and every sub-story with a definitive ending.

DeLillo's book is vast in its length, complexity, and hypnotic-like attraction. I found myself hating the book and yet impatient to pick it up again to resume this seemingly aimless wandering through the fifties, sixties, and seventies.

I want more from DeLillo. He brought back my childhood with his Sister Edgar and his street scenes in the Bronx. Read this book. Get through it all. It's worth it.

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: Relentlessly Readable
Review: First, please do not believe this book is unreadable. If you are new to DeLillo (as I was; this is the first book I read by this author) know that the tag "unreadable" is a reductionist generalization.

It is important to understand, that while this book admittedly may be difficult in some ways (the episodic nature of the narrative, the leaping forward and - mostly - backward in time, its haunted lyricism), it is more reader-friendly than books that are generally cited as "unreadable," books like *Finnegan's Wake," "Gravity's Rainbow," even "Ulysses." *Underworld* is difficult sort of like Faulkner is difficult; the style is personal to the author, it is new and wildly, but also precisely imagined; it does not fly off the planet - or if it does, it does so on a literary kind of bungi cord, i.e., you will always be called to earth, via the vast, but essentially traditional humanism that is this novel's deeply embedded anchor.

The paradox is clear: critics who advise that the book is unreadable, by definition, cannot have read it - and thus are not qualified to review it. If they have, then, by definition, it is not unreadable. Duh. This book gives pleasure because it has taken pains.

I won't try to summarize the book and its many specific qualities because I think the Amazon review does that better than I could. Bottom line: I loved this book, in spite of the question marks that hover over many of the passages (don't worry if you don't get something the first or second time it appears in the prose; you aren't supposed to get it yet). As I read along, I came to realize that the novel was teaching me how to read its own prose, and so I allowed the novel to lead me through its mysteries. I do not regret it. I trusted the story teller to tell me the story he meant to tell, and I trusted my own ability to wait for the punchline, and I stand in awe as a result. If you are willing to trust an 800+ page book with an investment of time and attention, this book should not disappoint.


Rating:
Summary: A must read for any aspirational author
Review: I first read Underworld four years ago and it's one of the few books I've read that had a major impact on me. It was also the first book by DeLillo I read and as soon as I finished it I went straight out and bought everything else he'd ever written, something I've only done with one other author, Joseph Heller.
The similarity between these two authors is that they both showed me just how great the modern novel can be. Despite what may be written elsewhere DeLillo's writing is anything but untruthful or affected. He does his best not to criticise or judge but to simply show a warts and all snapshot of the different ways it is possible for people to think in the world we live in today. Underworld is a beautiful book, funny and wistful, it's not the easiest book in the world to read but every sentence is rewarding. Once you've finished it I'm sure you'll do the same as I did and buy the rest of work.

Rating:
Summary: Magical!
Review: I was so impressed with this book. It like a lyrical spin on the world since the nuclear bomb was created and the Soviets made one too. I couldn't tell you what the book was about in parts but I learned to relax and go where the book took me. It's one of the most worthwhile books I've read in a long time.

Rating:
Summary: Surfing the Centruy
Review: Late in Underworld, DeLillo introduces the world wide web as a unifying metaphor for the book. This works beautifully, in an artistic sense, but it would be helpful to a reader to have the metaphor in mind at the outset. The scope of characters and situations is absolutlely huge. About page 500 or so, at the umpteenth shift across the decades (if not much sooner), you will find yourself wondering where in the world this book can possibly be going.

Hang in there! DeLillo has rendered our entire culture as a kind of hypertext journey. He begins with a baseball and an atomic bomb and surfs these two threads over the course of the cold war. In lesser hands this would be a terrible jumble, but DeLillo is a master and he will deliver you--as we were all delivered from the dread of nuclear destruction that is already fading from memory--to peace in the end.

Underworld is an immense saga of America, but without the all too familiar contrivances of the genre. It is a great and wonderful book, but make no mistake, it will challenge you listen for the subtle turns of phrase that define character, to note the faithful renderings of detail that yield resonating symbolism, and to recall, across a huge expanse of situation and dialogue, what is known and what is unknown. It is every bit as demanding as the best of Joyce or Faulkner and, for me, as rewarding in the end.

Rating:
Summary: Too Loong..
Review: Length is not a function of depth. In this book DeLillo adds a few hundred pages to the somewhat interesting postmodernist take on reality he presented in his more imaginative novel, White Noise. Indeed, since the plots of these novels are similar, there is no excuse for reading Underworld. This does not, however, imply that there is an excuse for reading the other novel. But, if you're looking fore something new to read, you could do worse than a 2-star novelist like DeLillo, who is at least trying to be meaningfully relevant.

Rating:
Summary: One Amazing Novel!
Review: This is a HUGE novel, both in length (over 800 pages) and in ambition, but is well worth the effort.
DeLillo starts things off with what is absolutely the most poetic
description of one of the most dramatic games in baseball history, the final playoff game between the Giants and the Dodgers in the Polo Grounds in 1951. He then slyly follows the path of the ball that Bobby Thompson hit for the deciding home run, as it is fought for, stolen, sold, and sold again and again,
finally being purchased by Nick Shay, a transplanted New Yorker,
now living in the suburbs of Phoenix. Here's the catch: Shay was a Dodger fan! So, the ball becomes a symbol not of victory over long odds, but of futility and loss. Loss is one key theme in this novel, the inevitable loss that occurs in life as the present fades into the past, the loss of relationships, the loss of roots, and the loss of identity as we remake ourselves.
DeLillo correctly identifies the remaking of one's identity as
a peculiarly American phenomenon, which leads him to a parallel
examination of American pop culture. Since the central character
works as a public relations officer for a waste management firm,
the central metaphor of the novel becomes pop culture as garbage.
On the one hand, he argues, pop culture is all that holds our society together, but on the other, it's all disposable. From Frank Sinatra to the Rolling Stones, from Jackie Gleason to Lenny
Bruce, from the flawed classics of Sergei Eisenstein to the superficialities of the contemporary art scene, DeLillo's eye
is dizzying and his insights are razor-sharp.
He counter-balances all this against the rise of the bomb and the sub-culture and paranoia that it spawned, a culture in which life itself becomes as disposable as last year's TV reruns.
This book thrives on jarring juxtapositions of time, place and feeling. You don't always want to go where the author is taking you, primarily because his skill in narrating his episodes is so keen, you don't want to leave one episode for the next. But that is part of the point. Life is change, according to DeLillo,
and change is always uncomfortable because it is so arbitrary.
There are enough ideas, both large and small, bouncing around in this novel to keep you thinking about them for weeks, months and years after you've read it. I read it 5 years ago, and I'm still thinking about it!
"I lead a quiet, non-descript little life, in a quiet, non-descript little suburb... just like anybody else in the federal witness protection program!"

Rating:
Summary: One Amazing Novel!
Review: This is a HUGE novel, both in length (over 800 pages) and in ambition, but is well worth the effort.
DeLillo starts things off with what is absolutely the most poetic
description of one of the most dramatic games in baseball history, the final playoff game between the Giants and the Dodgers in the Polo Grounds in 1951. He then slyly follows the path of the ball that Bobby Thompson hit for the deciding home run, as it is fought for, stolen, sold, and sold again and again,
finally being purchased by Nick Shay, a transplanted New Yorker,
now living in the suburbs of Phoenix. Here's the catch: Shay was a Dodger fan! So, the ball becomes a symbol not of victory over long odds, but of futility and loss. Loss is one key theme in this novel, the inevitable loss that occurs in life as the present fades into the past, the loss of relationships, the loss of roots, and the loss of identity as we remake ourselves.
DeLillo correctly identifies the remaking of one's identity as
a peculiarly American phenomenon, which leads him to a paralled
examination of American pop culture. Since the central character
works as a public relations officer for a waste management firm,
the central metaphor of the novel becomes pop culture as garbage.
On the one hand, he argues, pop culture is all that holds our society together, but on the other, it's all disposable. From Frank Sinatra to the Rolling Stones, from Jackie Gleason to Lenny
Bruce, from the flawed classics of Sergei Eisenstein to the superficialities of the contemporary art scene, DeLillo's eye
is dizzying and his insights are razor-sharp.
He counter-balances all this against the rise of the bomb and the sub-culture and paranoia that it spawned, a culture in which life itself becomes as disposable as last year's TV reruns.
This book thrives on jarring juxtapositions of time, place and feeling. You don't always want to go where the author is taking you, primarily because his skill in narrating his episodes is so keen, you don't want to leave one episode for the next. But that is part of the point. Life is change, according to DeLillo,
and change is always uncomfortable because it is so arbitrary.
There are enough ideas, both large and small, bouncing around in this novel to keep you thinking about them for weeks, months and years after you've read it. I read it 5 years ago, and I'm still thinking about it!
"I lead a quiet, non-descript little life, in a quiet, non-descript little suburb... just like anybody else in the federal witness protection program!"