Underworld: A Novel | Don DeLillo

Underworld: A Novel | Don DeLillo | good but difficult

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Underworld: A Novel

	Underworld: A Novel Don DeLillo Scribner, 1998 - 832 pages average customer review:based on 323 reviews view larger image
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A masterful novel

Underworld is one of my all time favorites. It beautifully written, layered, complex, with very rich characters that will keep you thinking long after finishing the novel. It follows multiple people, diverse, yet similar in that they are searching for meaning, understanding, love, and everything that we are all searching for, over the last 50 years of American society. The event that begins the novel is the shot heard round the world. Ostensibly this is the dramatic Bobby Thomson home run that miraculously won the pennant for the Giants. Ironically, the other shot heard round the world the same day was the USSR's first nuclear detonation which began the cold war and left Americans living for the first time under a cloud of fear of immediate destruction. Perhaps something changed at that time in the American psyche. Certainly these two events are juxtaposed and central to the novel. The characters come from this conflicted time in history and the reader follows them intently over the next 50 years. Their lives are described through a series of short stories or vignettes that are linked in some cases randomly, by transition of ownership of the famous baseball, by friendships, brief affairs, chance meetings, or involvement with the arms race. In some cases famous historical figures such as J. Edgar Hoover, and Lenny Bruce enter the novel. These moments are darkly humorous, but also very touching in the human and vulnerable portrayal of these individuals. I found them welcome interludes to the fictional narrative. The novel contains multiple characters. Nick Shay is probably the main one. He is a tough kid growing up in the Bronx in the 50's, scarred when his father disappears. He is involved in an accidental shooting in his teens, then attends a jesuit school, and finally becomes an executive for a major waste management company. He is a deeply thoughtful individual and there are many vignettes about modern waste management which range from hilarious to frankly disturbing. There are other main characters beside Nick equally rich in description and depth of portrayal, artists, chess players, teachers, nurses, nuns. A great diverse group of people trying to find meaning through love and work in these difficult times. One also finds many minor characters in the novel such as the Texas Highway Killer who may have only a vignette or short story. I think that they give a sense of this conflicted time in American society and add to a certain bleakness to the landscape of the book. This emptiness and sense of human frailty is part of the underworld of the novel that the characters seek to resolve. The journey can never be completely finished, but I had a sense of optimism after finishing the novel.

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good but difficult

This huge book is fascinating and filled with some of the most beautiful and truthful writing I have ever encountered. It is also filled with many `dead on' insights. It is not so much one story as a series of stories that proceed backward in time, mostly, but they are all connected as is everything in life, which is one of his points. The book requires some patience to read but as with all good things that we work at, the rewards are nothing less than astounding.

Mighty themes

Just as the Bush Administration has been accused of being a Cold War administration in search of an enemy, Delillo might be a Cold War novelist in search of a subject. Underworld takes as its main theme the Cold War. Not, as other novelists might attempt it, about characters and their mirco stories as they were shaped by the period, but about the Cold War itself, as an epic, ideological phenomenon, and how all human lives were bundled under its steely umbrella.

Delillo is a big canvas novellist, and this is his biggest. He uses big social scapes to play out his scenes - baseball, the graffiti in the Bronx, the B2 Bombers laden with missiles on the North Atlantic run, waste, childhood fear. Underworld is a sprawling epic that achieves its effect by fusing a plethora of characters and scenes together in a tough, boiler plated, jazzy style. It clearly aspires to great American novel status, and at times achieves it. The opening shot-heard-around-the-world scene at the baseball game is justly acclaimed in its panoramic stylish detail and multi layered intellectual and artistic weight. From then on the narrative swells and roils through time, character and space through the ensuing half century as characters search for meaning, survival and love in a menacing period.

850 or so pages is mighty big for a novel. Too big I reckon. The book doesn't quite sustain the weight and there is a much pointed out sag in the middle where the pace and heft of the stories and ideas flatline for a few hundred pages.

Still, Underworld is an epic novel, by one of America's finest living novelists, and contains much that commands our attention.

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