Rating: 
Summary: The World Above and Below
Review: This is a powerful look at what lies beneath. Yes, it is a big book, and it does take a lot of time to read it. Its rewards, though, are great.
Strangely enough, when the WTC towers collapsed on 9/11, I thought of the cover illustration for this book: the towers bracket the cross on top of the neighborhood church. What a metaphor: the towers are gone but the church, so close by, is none the worse for wear.
This book will wear well, too.
Rating: 
Summary: A "must read"
Review: This is one of the best novels I have read in years. It was difficult to put down. Is Delillo pretentious? Sure, and so are a lot of other great writers. I will continue to re-read Underworld, because I suspect that it becomes more powerful the longer the reader has lived life.
Rating:
Summary: A "must read"
Review: This is one of the best novels I have read in years. It was difficult to put down. Is Delillo pretentious? Sure, and so are a lot of other great writers. I will continue to re-read Underworld, because I suspect that it becomes more powerful the longer the reader has lived life.
Rating:
Summary: All sound and fury?
Review: What are we to make of <Underworld, DeLillo's 800+ page diary of individuals living under the very real threat, but later fading specter, of the Cold War? Whites, Blacks, Italians, Jews; men, women, children. From a historic baseball game in New York, to the Arizona desert, to the nuclear waste dumps of the former USSR; from the dimly lit mob hangouts of 1950s Bronx, to the ghetto of the 1960s, and the sterile Southwest suburbs of the 1980s, DeLillo takes us on a voyage to explore human lives reacting to, ignoring, and resisting the forces of New World power brokers--governments, corporations; and ideology.
In the obligatory post-modern disarray of narrative and sequential existence, DeLillo criscrosses space-time on a desperate search, along with his own characters; but--like them--on a lonely search. For what? Americana, baseball memorabilia, a vanished father, a map drawn on Gorbachev's head, mystical signs from above appearing on a billboard? Myriad symbols and patterns emerge to guide the desperate wanderers on their obsessive, hopeless quest: a significant baseball, graffitti, waste.
But to what end? I suspect this book has much more appeal to the boomers and the folks who grew up during and with cold war as DeLillo remembers it. This is not to mislead the potential reader into thinking that Underworld is "about" the cold war. But, in coursing through the lives of its characters--celebrities, government spooks, common folk, and clergy, one feels the sense and power of interconnectedness that unites disparate souls. DeLillo wields his scepter mightily, achieving an amazing complete omniscience over his charactera; and, at the same time, speaking from each of their minds--a collective omniscience, not an altogether deific one. In the end, though--for me, it was mostly lots of noise.
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