Underworld: A Novel | Don DeLillo | Best opening 100 pages in last 100 years

Underworld: A Novel | Don DeLillo | A bag of mulch with very few well concealed marbles in it

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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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Best opening 100 pages in last 100 years

The long novel seems incompatible with our society's, and my own, preference for instant gratification and declining attention span. But this is an 800 page novel that carries you effortlessly from place to place, with an incisive vision of American life over the past 50 years. The content happily varies between comic and tragic, profound and pedestrian.

And the first 100 pages are the so riveting and powerful that they ought to be required reading for every American: it's rare to see such a sustained intensity over 100 pages, nevermind that he manages to not lose much over the next several hundred pages.

Describing the content will not help the reader any better than describing the content of Leaves of Grass would. The story, such as there is one, surrounds a celebrated baseball, nuclear paranoia, J. Edgar Hooever, an artist in the desert, an obsessive compulsive nun and the "main" character, a kind of everyman who works with the "underworld" of material/cultural waste. DeLillo's blazing talent is weaving these disparate elements into a coherent and meaningful whole, serving as a kind of counterweight to Eliot's disintegrated Waste Land, constructing from a meditation on debris and refuse a powerful vision of human meaning, as it is lived today. Given the trumpet-sounding theme, one can forgive the book's ending for being a bit cheesy - it is disappointing to hit a flat note at the end of the tune, but the symphonic precession is none the less for it. All in all, this book is an American masterpiece, one of the few produced since the decline of Modernism.

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A bag of mulch with very few well concealed marbles in it

Ah, whatever happened to following a story neatly developed around several (and by that I mean no more than say 5 or 6) characters? Why, Don? Why do you have to taunt me? Why did you not only introduce 10 or more characters, but also jumped around in time? How much more confusing can you make this novel? Did you ever think of us, born after the clock struck 12 of December 31, 1970?

Truly, I was lost in the pages. I lost my way somewhere between 1953 and 1962. I tried. Believe me. I tried. I searched for signs. I looked for ways to make sense of this cacophony of historical events, of human emotions, of snippets of dialogs. I tried unsuccessfully. For 800 pages, Don, I tried. For 800 pages I lifted the lamp above my head and searched for a way to proceed forward. At some point the road was sufficiently lit. I followed Nick's tracks for example in his adolescent explorations, but then I lost them again. Then my mind retracted in further confusion when you introduced the I-character, and then the Edgar-character, and many more, and `Me-lost again'.

Don, believe me, I loved `The Body Artist'. I liked `Cosmopolis'. But despite the monolithic effort, all I can say about your `Underworld' is that it's drenched in confusion, in post-modern babble. It's a bag of mulch, Don, and I had to dig to find the very few marbles buried in it in order to satisfy my lust for Contemporary American Literature.
I actually felt truly sorry for the readers, for myself.

- by Simon Cleveland

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