Underworld: A Novel

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!

This is my third DeLillo novel (White Noise and Mao II were the first two), and it's easily the most ambitious, overwhelmingly beautiful and true of the three novels.
You don't simply read Underworld, you invest time in it. Through it's poignant subplots, this book pays dividends with a view of a broad slice of American life that is tied together with common themes: garbage, nuclear bombs, baseball

This large volume by Don Delillo is a great book, placing Cold War American life under the microscope. Though events often seem choppy or meaningless to the story, this book reaches, at times, the high expectations that its author aims for. The prologue, as long as it is, remains the best and most powerful section of this book. I could easily see it being extracted for large college anthologies for 20th Century Literature. This wasn't the best book to come out of 1997; John Banville's The Untouchable was. However it's one of the best, along side Philip Roth's American Pastoral and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon.

This is an important novel. It is not a cheerful one,it's realistic and scary, yet profoundly revealing of our society and values.
It's a summary of who we have become, of our culture, or at the very least a well-educated view of the last half of this century.
There's a lot of images here, a movie in words, the places and people come alive under the author's pen. Amongst all the descriptions and dialogues, you will find little sentences that are worth re-reading often.
I was especially touched by the epilogue, a brilliant overview of Us,now.
One thing did annoy me at one point, the jumping in time parts were sometimes dizzying.
Still, it was a book where I learned, felt conflicting emotions and that willl stay within for a long time.

Underworld is a suite of vignettes of U.S middle-class life in the second half of the 20th Century. Had the vignettes been chronologically arranged they would have made two or three novellas.But DeLillo did not do so. Instead the pieces go in reverse order, chronologically. Thus storywise the book ceases to hold one's attention.
As regards language, it is often American slang and where DeLillo goes into good prose, he is verbose and long-winded. He must apppreciate that passages like, "Tunnels and runways and washed blue light and then the opening to the stage, the loud white glare and prehistoric roar," do not make him a Rimbaud. Where he attempte a staccato style, he is far inferior to Hemingway.However there are sentences deeply touching as when Nick says, after Amy aborts their unwanted fetus, "You tried to think yourself into the middle of the child's unlived life". There are passages of amazing beauty and power. Of the city at night with Power failure, DeLillo says "with its neon ego shut down"!!And on reading DeLillo's description of the misshapen fetusus caused by the testing of Nuclear Bombs, one would pray that all nations should avoid Nuclear power for war or electricity
Regarding middle-class life in the U.S., one would get the wrong impression on reading the book. That sex without love was was easy and common. Example, the two sex scenes between Klara and Nick, the former a wife and mother and a budding artist and the latter a boy of 17, little educated and merely a hauling and delivery boy, and just after a single casual meeting. Equally so are the stories of Amy and Nick and the adultery between Marion and Brian Glassic.That ethical standards were lax the story being that of a black father stealing his minor son's proud possession- the base ball which was hit for a home-run and brought victory to the Giants- and selling it to Nick.
Ultimately, one could appreciate the book as an appeal for peace in the world, at least to be without Atomic weapons.
On the whole a lengthy disapointment.

Quite simply Mr. Delillo has cut ot a niche in the literay world with this book alone. His use of metaphor and epigramatic paragraphs is a testament to his magisterial talent. Some search for history and plot and character development in this magnum opus ...well these tone deaf readers will come away disappointed for Delillo writes English prose in a magnificent poetic style which surely isn't for all ....only those who love ....truly love language for languages sake will find this book to be as beautiful as i did ..there are aspects of this work that stand on their own as essays and even short stories. If one is searching for a linear history of the cold war or a social history of the last 5 decades of the last century don't read this book ...but if one wants to grasp the poetry of this era and its language from Lenny Bruce to J.Edgar Hoover buy it read it and tell a friend.Future generations will be taught this book in colleges for many years to come i predict.

DeLillo's Underworld is simply the best book I have ever read. His sweep of post-WWII American culture is all encompassing and unparalleled in American literature. This book, like DeLillo's other works, is an oddity in that it is both an extremely engaging, page-turning read and a genuine work of literary art. The beginning section, The Triumph of Death, is stunning. The image of J. Edgar Hoover shocked at the magazine page that flew into his hands tells volumes. The rest of the book, with sections on Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover among others, not to mention the protagonists Klara Sax and Nick Shay, are masterful. These mere adjectives that I use to describe this book do not do it justice! If you're a fan of Pynchon, other DeLillo works, Haruki Murakami, or just fantastic writing, you must read this book!

Don DeLilo isn't to be trifled with.

"Underworld" reads thickly and slowly, and I found it quite the challenge. Some days I could read thirty, forty pages, just go for hours and not notice the time, while other days I'd get maybe five pages read and have to quit. There is so much compressed on these pages, it feels akin to reading flourless chocolate cake; thick, slow, filling, and delicious.

While I'm not saying every new page brings new joy, I am saying that the book as a whole certainly does. Once every few pages I would find myself dog-earing the book, to return to that section later. His understanding of people and of the human soul is phenomenal, I felt like I new every one of the characters at their most intimate and essential level.

On the whole, I think this is one of the most masterful and excellent books I've read in years. A classic.

One of my absolute favorite books. The jumps between NY and the Southwest + the way memory, landscape, art and the distance between years and human relationships are captured is just outstanding. Highly recommended.

Not a book to forget, ordained and subtle, a pearl of linguistic marvels. A very personal impression of mine -I consider it a fact- serveral stories entwined in a mighty effacing chaos, some delirius charecterization and some modest vulgarism. Never been to America, but if this were a framing of american society it couldn't have been done better. Masterpieces have always caused me abandonment and recluse, obeying this Barometer I'd call it freaking. Every reprsentation of caste and/or time period in this book seems utterly realistic for an uncanny teenager like myself, it might be right,it might be not. The critisisms are not as abundently delivered as in White Noise yet He seems to have been occupied with america's uncouthness and revolutionary shallowness in a way as obssesive and mocking as I have never observed before. A must be read

I felt totally enveloped in the novel's plots and highways through the last half of this century. I could not put it down. Why do people make such a fuss over length. The Bronx section was very reminscent of my childhood in Philadelphia. Many late nites but a wonder to behold. One of my favorites in a long while.

It begins with a crowd witnessing a miracle (the Giants Win The Pennant!) and ends with a crowd witnessing a miracle (the apparition of a murdered girl appearing on a billboard). But in the years and chapters between the middle of the twentieth century and its end, the Underworlds of the 1950s -- the nuclear state, the cold war secrets -- give way to new Underworlds, linked and webbed and connected to the surface in ways that a society which saw evil as a thing apart could never have imagined. The realm of Pluto, of waste, of waste management, of the Pynchonite conspiracies of WASTE, ending, as the Wasteland does, with the shattering weight and promise and threat of a single word: Peace.

DeLillo's Underworld has some difficult aspects. It presents a history of a world in decline, as we follow (in rough shod fashion) the life of Nick Shay, a waste expert. DeLillo throws in snippets of times and other lives into the mix, for all too fleeting periods. Reading this book is maddening for all the unfinished stories. However, the total sum of its parts adds up to a great thesis. I have long wanted to read this book, but it took me a LONG time to read. Now I feel it has spoiled my reading to come. This is because DeLillo's writing is very masterful and intelligent and spare. I loved the theme - of the Cold War and the examination of the detritus of our (recent) times. Personally Nick's character did not resonate with me. There was the wrong kind of introspection and the most intriguing aspect of his life took too long to unfold. However the story of his father and his brother made sense as did that of Klara Sax.

To read it now, it feels like DeLillo was ahead of his (political) time. I think he missed demonstrating the communist hysteria and the rejection of the foreign when the novel dips into the 50s and 60s. He does capture the fear and emptiness of the modern world and beginnings of the materialist mania that America was headed for very well.

Overall, if you enjoy books that are challenging, please read this book. It may take some time, but it will be worth it.

This book covers many subjects with a very detailed point of view. Delillo can fit a lifetime's worth of feeling and emotion into one paragraph and there's about 800 pages of it for those who can handle the pain of introspection. I think people have problems with it because it forces you to look at your own life and all the relationships and decisions that have led you to the point where you are now. 'Underworld' is about memories: the good ones, the bad ones, the forgotten ones and the ones that seem insignificant til you remember them 10 years later. Not for the faint of heart.

I was a DeLillo virgin, so I went into this novel without bias. I've also read plenty of long novels (Count of Monte Cristo, Karamazov Brothers, 2666, and others), so I'm confident the length in and of itself had no bearing on my feelings toward the novel.

I finished this book about a month ago and I have already forgotten nearly everything that happens. The last 100 pages of the book were so dull and laborious that by the time I learned of Nick's crime I didn't really care. By that time I was virtually speed reading just so I could be done with it.

The prologue is the best part of the book. The remainder is unfocused ramblings about life during the Cold War, and whatever else the literati want to say it's about. Much of his language is cheap. His quirky "turns of phrases" are annoying. I'd cut somewhere between 150 and 200 pages if I were his editor and tell him to explore Nick's relationship with his wife more: the heroin usage and infidelity, in particular. And how many people still care about Lenny Bruce? 50?

DeLillo also falls into the trap of loving himself loving New York, a pratfall that authors such as Doctorow skillfully avoid. We get it Don, you love New York. It's the coolest. In fact, my appreciation for Doctorow has grown by reading DeLillo. In fact, the next time I'm tempted to try another DeLillo novel I'll probably just opt for one of the few Doctorow novels I have yet to read.

One could spend years with Underworld as it contains so much thought provoking, poetic and historical material. Delillo's prose is something to marvel at, but then so are the characters, the vignettes, the sweep of time and the montage of his sequence. Not all of it this easy to follow and one must be willing to really familarize oneself with the progressive layers of his writing. Language is very much a thread throughout the book, from discussions about the power of vocabulary to the regional aspects of American English, to the true poetry of the Delillo's writing, and so much more. Masculinity and the American male as a cultural, political, psychological etc. animal is explored with a wonderful touch. One item i haven't seen yet in the reviews is mention of Richard Poe's reading of the unabridged book. Just incredible. Much more like radio theater than a book really. I can't say enough good about the book or Poe's narration.

If DeLillo was trying to write the `Great American Novel' then he surely must have known that brevity has always been the prima facia characteristic of such works. Underworld checks in just shy of 930 pages and is slightly longer than James Joyce's Ulysses.

It would be unfair to exclude this novel from the cannon of great American writing just based on its sheer heft alone; it has many other serious shortcomings. Most of the characters speak in the same prophetic and self-aware mode. DeLillo's initially masterful use of simile and description suddenly become ledden, dense and relentless after the first fifty pages and by the end of the book it feels like you've just completed a trek hacking through a dense Borneo jungle.

An industrious and rapacious editor could have knocked this into something a little special. As it stands, it's the literary equivalent of Costner's original five hour director's cut of Waterworld.

This book suffers from the worst aspects of post-modern stories (namely, an autofellative narcissism) without any of its good asepcts (any sort of witty irreverence). "Underworld" is compulsively obsessed and in love with its own structure. "Look at me! I'm over 800 pages long! I go from Phoenix to Kahzakstan. I'm told chronologically backwards! Aren't I special?" DeLillo often inserts some object in one scene (e.g. orange juice or a picture of Jane Mansfield) just to have it deliberately pop up in the next scene, which takes place five years before. Isn't that clever?
The structure is impressive, but it doesn't make up for the forced writing style or forgettable characters. Nominally the plot is about some guy who might have committed a murder in the past. I guess. DeLillo seems as apathetic to the plot as I was. Admittedly, there were a couple of scenes that I enjoyed like the Lenny Bruce monologues or the scene involving the Zapruder footage. But it's hardly worth slogging through this book to find them. The much-praised opening scene, describing Bobby Thompson's famous "Shot Heard 'Round the World" and featuring J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason, and Frank Sinatra, among other people, chatting in the stands was an overly conscious attempt at being "writterly." Its solemnity was laughable. "Look at me! I'm talking about Race and Culture in Cold War America! Am I not a Great American Novel?" Underworld, you're no Moby Dick. You're not even a Moderately Interesting American Novel.

I thought I must enjoy this book being a baseball fan and a waste engineer, and I found those two themes and the lead character Nick Shay/Costanza full of insight, but the rest of the novel is just too long with many diversions that either go nowhere or are overwrought. This novel with 300 pages cut out, and focused on a baseball and Nick would be very good to excellent. The baseball interludes are structured like Accordion Crimes by Proulx, which I greatly enjoyed, following the people attached to an object. The main plot on the other hand goes backward in time starting near the present in the 90s and going back to the 50s, with an epilogue in the 90s again. This structure would work for me if only the book were shorter and tightly edited, as it is, I lost the links and didn't really care that I'd missed them. The novel seems to want to set up `mysteries' that we assume will be resolved at the end, and some are, but others are not. The street dialogue of Brooklyn in the 50s was very evocative, and the ties between waste, objects, and longing were all well developed. Let me end with a couple of my favourite quotes:

"He imagined he was watching the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza--only this was twenty-five times bigger.... All this ingenuity and labor, this delicate effort to fit maximum waste into diminishing space. The towers of the World Trade Center were visible in the distance and he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one.... all the great works of transport, trade and linkage were directed in the end to this culminating structure.... He looked at all that soaring garbage and knew for the first time what his job was all about.... He dealt in human behaviour, people's habits and impulses, their uncontrollable needs and innocent wishes, maybe their passions, certainly their excesses and indulgences but their kindness too, their generosity, and the question was how to keep this mass metabolism from overwhelming us.
The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, ... and he saw himself for the first time as a member of an esoteric order, they were adepts and seers, crafting the future, the city planners, the waste managers, the compost technicians, the landscapers who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and lost and eroded object of desire."

"I rearrange books on the old shelves and match and mix for the new shelves and then I stand there looking... Or I walk through the house and look at the things we own and feel the odd mortality that clings to every object. The finer and rarer the object, the more lonely it makes me feel, and I don't know how to account for this."

"At a glance he belongs to these wild privatized times, to the marathon of danced-out plots."

...as to why seemingly everyone claims that Delillo is a master of prose. I started this book really expecting and hoping to like it. After 100 pages, I did something I had never done before-- abandoned ship! I put it down and haven't looked back, something I thought would be hard but in this case was disconcertingly easy... My problem with this book (I've never read Delillo before) was not only the uninteresting assembly of scenes and characters, but the over-worked almost ridiculous prose. The scene at the Dodger's game with Frank Sinatra etc. in the audience had great potential, and there were a few spectacular moments, but sentence after sentence of sophmoric over-achieving prose just turned me off. I was particularly the dialogue of the black boy (who catches the ball) and his family-- horribly stereotypic and unrealistic, almost offensive. I couldn't stand it.
Don't mistake me for someone who gives up easily-- Ulysses is my favorite book and I'm almost finished with the *fantastic* Infinite Jest. Incidentally, David Foster Wallace once mentioned in an interview that he thinks Don Delillo's prose is some of the best around. I'm flabbergasted....

I hope it doesn't seem too absurd to review a book I've only half-read, but my feelings for this novel are so mixed, I needed to know the views of those who had got to the end.
It appears that people either love or hate this book, (although everyone seems to like the opening chapter.) I can't say it's the best American novel I've ever read - but I have certainly never read anything like it. Like its characters, it yearns - to be whole, to be liked, to succeed and so far I think it is on the right track.
If it ever finds a plot, I'll get to the end a little quicker, but if it doesn't, I think I'm happy to follow wherever it takes me.
Curious.

I tried, really _tried_ to plow through Underworld's 800+ pages. I just couldn't do it. Too much like work. I can appreciate what DeLillo was trying to do to sum up post-WWII America, and using the travels of one of the most famous baseballs in sports history is certainly a clever way to do it, but I simply never felt engaged in this work. The characters seemed flat and uninteresting...and I got really fed up with nearly every character speaking like Jackie Mason. "What? You want I should finish this book? You should know from books!" I suspect that if you are about 50, and you grew up in Brooklyn, you'll enjoy this more than I did.

I read this book because someone compared it with Ulysses and cited it as one of the most important books of the 20th Century. The resemblance to Ulysses stops at the number of pages. Both books are over 800 pages but it ends there. Persevering through Ulysses and the unique style of Joyce takes a lot of effort and the reader is rewarded in the end with greatest affirmation ever written ... Yes. Yes. On the contrary, De Lillo's opus seems to descend down into back alleys, garbage dumps and landfills. I suppose one could write a doctoral dissertation on the garbage metaphor in Underworld. The smart reader is advised to forget about metaphors and just leave it at garbage period. I haven't read anything else by this author and was quite disappointed that he failed to live up to the hype. Might a suggest a career writing copy or commercial jingles instead?

I think I am guilty of mistaking it and reading it expecting something like Godfather by Mario Puzo. Was I disappointed? You Bet!
First the good news. The command on english the author has is commendable. It just flows.
But the bad news... There is barely a plot. You have to keep track of so many characters and the time periods do not have a chronological order that you feel exasperated and willing to give up. I think more than the usual average would have given up reading this after starting.
If what you expect is a good literary treat and not a great plot and story this is for you. Otherwise it is a strict no-no.

I realize that I have given away my intellectual shallowness with this title, but I have to admit to finding this book about as much fun as a root canal. After being captivated by the prologue, set at the Polo Grounds in 1951, I expected similarly beautiful and sweeping writing going forward.
What I got instead was a writer who seemed intent on using every metaphor, every arcane artistic term and name and every meticulously researched, but superflous fact he could. The effect is that of an author trying to show how smart he is, and getting bogged down. Having poured so many words into it, rather than editing out the fluff, he instead goes on a book tour and presents it as high art.
The book has its moments. Beyond the prologue, the characters are interesting enough. He just doesn't do enough with them. They're all dressed up and have no place to go.
I read this book because I wanted to become a more rounded reader. I wanted a critically aclaimed opus that would take some time and effort. What I got was the literary equivalent of a death march, bringing only relief, no joy or enlightenment, when I finished.

First ~50 pages are outstanding
CHARACTERS: poorly conceived and incompletely drawn
PLOT: needlessly complicated and confused
STYLE: impressive at times, but rendered pompous/pretentious by the context
EDITING: unforgivable. This should be a 400 page book or a collection of short stories. Instead it's a ponderous, 800 page, incoherent mess
Aside from the first 50 pages or so, I can't think of a reason that anyone would want to read this book, and I'm even more confused that anyone could LIKE it. But what do I know....

I feel compelled to finish Underworld, since I slapped down the $27.50. I find it one of the most unbearable books I've ever read. Wait for the paperback edition (or get yourself a wagon, like I did) because you're going to be lugging this loser around a long time.

I don't ask much from a novel. Give me a tangible plot, some coherent paragraphs, decent dialogue and characters with reasonable definition, and I'll wade through it somehow. Particularly when Newsweek went into rhapsodies over it, and even the promotional reviewers in the store rated it the Book of the Century. So, what went wrong? My wife, a woman of very good taste and a liberal attitude, got to page 263 and gave up; I lasted for a few pages more. Tell you what I'm going to do--I'll stash this one on our bulging bookshelves for a year or so, and then I'll try it again. I hate to see the twenty bucks go to a complete waste.

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.

This book seems to take place entirely in the world described by Billy Joel's first albums--the chaotic seventies, full of "giants in the earth". It memorializes all the weird bits of American social history that I think make current American fiction so dark--gas lines, nuclear war, greed, power. Growing up in the sunny Reagan years it seems like a big dream that on Tuesdays my parents couldn't buy gas, but it happened. What was that like?, I often wonder. This is how. I've been waiting a long time for a book describing the interior mental life of young Italians in NYC and here it is. I read this book just for that and the opening baseball game scene but came away with so much more.

Ya know how people ordinarily play God thru power-tripping? Well, that's not the only way to play God. Another way to play God is to perpetrate mysterious conspiracies. How do I know this? Well, Don told me so himself. Via the following 2 quotes.

From UNDERWORLD: "Paranoid. Now he knew what it meant, this word that was bandied and bruited so easily, and he sensed the connections being made around him, all the objects and shaped silhouettes and levels of knowledge--not knowledge exactly but insidious intent. But not that either--some deeper meaning that existed solely to keep him from knowing what it was."

From UNDERWORLD: "A long time ago, years ago, I read a book called THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING ... And I read this book and began to think of God as a secret, a long unlighted tunnel, on and on. This was my wretched attempt to understand our blankness in the face of God's enormity. This is what I respected about God. He keeps his secret. And I tried to approach God through his secret, his unknowability."

DeLillo's borderline-mystical connectionism is a first-class pain-in-the-patoot and seems to be exactly what Elias Canetti was complaining about when Canetti made the following comment: "I cannot bear writers who connect everything with everything. I love writers who limit themselves, who write beneath their intelligence, as it were, who seek refuge from their own cleverness, ducking low, but without throwing it away or losing it. Or those for whom their cleverness is new, something they acquired or discovered very late. There are some who become illuminated by minor things, suddenly: wonderful. There are some who are constantly illuminated by 'important' things: terrible."

Let it also be known that UNDERWORLD contains a tedious running jazz-name subtext.

From UNDERWORLD: "Marvin Lundy opened the door, a hunched fellow with a stylized shuffle, in his late sixties, holding a burnt-out cigar."

From SHE'S GOT IT ALL by Gary Giddins: "Dwight Macdonald used to complain that his every knock was a boost; but for me every boost brings a sellout. So it's with some trepidation that I call your attention to an authentic young jazz singer named Carmen Lundy."

From UNDERWORLD: "This is a fact of modern combat, according to Louis T. Bakey."

From ART BLAKEY by Gary Giddins: "The best known of his techniques was a pressroll so individual in style it became known as the Blakey Pressroll: a rumbling on the snare, usually employed at turnbacks, which had the effect of lifting the soloist, the band, and the listener into the air for a few seconds and then gently depositing everyone in the next chorus."

From UNDERWORLD: "You know Willie Mabrey?"

From THE HISTORY OF JAZZ: "In the late 1940s, Blakey also led a large band and a smaller combo under the name 'Jazz Messengers'. In the mid-1950s, he revived the name with a quintet nominally led by pianist Horace Silver, and featuring a front line of trumpeter Kenny Dorham and tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley."

From UNDERWORLD: "Ray Lofaro had no idea what they were talking about."

From THE POET: BILL EVANS by Gene Lees: "After that Bill formed a standing trio, with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, with which group Orrin Keepnews produced a series of Riverside albums that constitute one of the most significant bodies of work in the history of jazz."

From UNDERWORLD: "Janet Urbaniak was Matt's girlfriend, a registered nurse."

From URBANIAK HAS AN IDEA WHO TIME HAS RETURNED by John S. Wilson: "Michal Urbaniak, the jazz violinist from Poland, who settled in the United States 8 years ago playing electronic fusion music with a group called, appropriately, Fusion, is once again on what he calls his 'circular road'."

From UNDERWORLD: "She told me that my father was the third person in the room the day I shot George Manza."

From I NEVER STUDIED by Don Menza: "One day I heard a jazz record--BODY AND SOUL. Then the next day somebody let me listen to a Gene Ammons record. And 3 weeks later I had a tenor saxophone."

I expected alot more from Delillo after reading the many great reviews of his latest book. But I find myself disappointed at this long, fragmented prose. The story lacks any coherent flow, it is merely a good paragraph here and there but that doesn't make it a great book.

I had a professor in college who once said that "if you don't like shakespeare, the problem is with you, not with shakespeare." the same could be said about this novel. the opening chapter is a balls to the wall (literally!) masterpiece, and has been released separately as a novella (pafko at the wall) so if you don't feel you can commit to the heft of underworld (it is hefty!) you will be enriched by reading the opening sequence under separate cover. delilo is a national treasure, and this is his finest work (so far). it moved him into the ranks of the greatest american writers, living or dead. it is simply too important to be missed. have a sweater handy. you'll need it to fight off the chills.

I read this book, because it was recommended by a friend. After reading the opening story about the "Shot Heard Round the World", I was prepared for an amazing book. But to my disappointment, it turned out to be boring and convoluted. I get was this book is about--a deconstructive look at the American psyche during the cold war period. It is a loosely tied together set of stories--glimpses into people's lives really--linked by the number 13, a baseball, nuclear war and garbage. But who cares? For all of the author's witty prose and random occurences, the book does not do what it should--tell a story. The author could have made the book 400 pages or so and done the same thing. Instead, he gets too caught up in his deconstructionist experiment. Don't read it unless you have a lot of patience and time on your hands.

Using historical facts, literary and filmic history, and all the cliches of Americana, DeLillo delivers his masterpiece, a mournful exploration of the violence of childhood, the eruption of consciousness -- historical and personal -- with hard-working yet graceful prose and a love story haunting and human. "Underworld" lacks the postmodern excesses of his previous books, connecting to the human heart in a novel that has been unfairly maligned by a literary culture that's thrown unambitious novels like "Cold Mountain" and "American Pastoral" all the awards this year.

I admit to reading this book three times before i got all the little crossreferences throughout the book. It's complicated at times but never hard to read and it will leave you amazed time and time again. The story (or stories) of one person after the war, the threat of imminent destruction hovering over us all in the form of the bomb. Amazing.

Extraordinary. Again. And that cover photo of the twin towers from broadway over the church with the greenest grass in town. Very funny, like the book itself. Had to go long, huh jerky? 800 pages, like it was plucked off'a grave, out of that greenest graveyard. A most revealing tomb, offering every reason in the book to leave town. Like cold calling around the corner. Nice try tough-guy. But we are here for the long hawl, long after BFI, Balthizar, and all these stinking cars go electric, at least until we all get those long awaited picture phones. We don't need no badges, right?

Anytime someone asks me what to read, I point him or her to this book. I've probably recommended it 100 times since I read it six or seven years ago. They only reason I'm reviewing it now is that I saw it online and was curious as to whether it was rated 4.5 or 5 stars by the reading public. 3.5 is a scandal.

Flaws occur when characters of note, like Cotter and Bill, and tales of potential- like the peregrinations of Bobby Thomson's pennant winning home run ball (one of the better passages in the post-Prologue portion of the book comes when the reader learns that Nick Shay wasted $35,000 on a ball that likely is not the actual ball Thomson launched into Cotter's mitts), are given shortshrift, in favor of the terminally dull Klara Sax, and the pointless serial killer tale. Then, the revelation of Nick Shay's accidental killing of his friend is revealed, and the reader shrugs, because we've seen the man do far more ethically dubious things. Yes, perhaps, psychologically, it's more cogent for the character to obsess on the death of his friend, and the unjust punition he received for it, but, to the reader, its being set up as the grand `twist' of the book causes an inevitable letdown that could have been avoided had the book been chronologically based. In this way, and in a few other less salient subplots, the bulk of the book's reverse chronology comes off as a mere stunt, not a cogent literary tactic. Also, when characters are dropped for hundreds of pages, then reappear, it is difficult for a reader to even recognize them as a reappearing character, rather than a new one. This is because, if one employs such a tactic, two indispensable things are needed: 1) a strong narrative arc (regardless of chronological direction), and 2) strong, memorable, and necessary appearances by the recurring characters.

Then there is the issue of DeLillo's so-called Postmodernism, but, as stated early, and clearly shown in these excerpts, DeLillo is clearly a classically realistic novelist. Some critics, in attempting to row against the tide, have made claims comparing DeLillo to Charles Dickens, but this comparison is as faulty and absurd as calling him a Postmodernist. Why? Because, while Dickens' characters often descended into parody, satire, and, at their worst, mere caricatures, he was, at his best, in his best protagonists, such as Pip, Oliver Twist, or David Copperfield, plus a number of other characters, able to craft real characters of depth and range. And, even when not at his best, his characters were colorful and memorable, yet, as I mentioned earlier, I can barely recall any major events and plot points from Underworld, and the characters are forgettably grise. And merely playing with non-linear narratives does not make one a Postmodernist. If so, then writers as diverse as Homer, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Joseph Heller, Laurence Sterne, and Kurt Vonnegut, amongst many others, would have to be considered Postmodernists. Clearly they are not, and many wrote long before that bane of art was espoused. Yet, if one looks at DeLillo, the realist, one must conclude that he is not a very good realistic writer (excepting parts of the Prologue), for his phrasings revel in the very banality and dullness of realistic Realism, rather than embracing the literary Realism, which presents the illusion of reality via the seeming offhand poetic tangency of allusions and dialogue, and the concision of large ideas hidden in seemingly simple exchanges. None of this resides outside of the Prologue, which itself, is sometimes overly long and too comic where it should be serious, and vice-versa. Aside from the didactic dialogue, airy modifiers, longueurs, and narrative anomy, Underworld's biggest flaw, as critic James Wood notes, is that it has `no single individual who absolutely matters.'

In this, the hit and miss Wood is absolutely correct. After the Prologue, I was ready to state that DeLillo was that rare published writer who might actually be worthy of all the blurbery he received. Over 750 pages, and two days, later I returned to my Dart Toss assessment when encountering a piece of good writing by a writer who has produced nothing else of consequence. Perhaps the emotion and pungency of the Dodgers-Giants playoff was so special to DeLillo that he wrote on autopilot? He was Divinely Inspired? He got lucky? Underworld is, at the least, a notch or two above the typical MFA writing mill trash of recent decades, but the only real argument it can inspire is whether or not its Prologue is well enough written to lift the whole gray hulk above being bad and into the alms of mediocrity. That this book placed behind Toni Morrison's Beloved (another book of potential that fails due to anomic editing and a damning of its good characters and plots for lesser ones), in a 2006 poll of writers as the best work of American fiction of the last quarter century shows just how far American literature has fallen in these times.

This is a terrific book!
Norman Mailer has been spouting off for years about writing The Great American Novel and Don DeLillo has gone ahead and done it with "Underworld."
Having read "Underworld," I plan to read ALL his work, he's that good.
DeLillo makes me think deeper and feel deeper. By which I mean, he helps me communicate with what's outside and all that's within.
Like DiMaggio, he makes it look easy.
("A hundred years," paisan!)

DeLillo is a shallow genius. He often makes witty observations and quips and attempts to assemble these (in Underworld using the pathetic motif of baseball as his "glue") into a coherent novel. He fails, as he did in White Noise and Libra.
Unfortunately DeLillo, the unabashed postmodernist, substitutes superficiality in character, plot, and trivializes the novel as an artform while garnering reviews from hungry critics desperate for anything palatable. For them any food tastes good (look at Grisham, Clancy, King etc, gawdawful) as they are very hungry.
This made me vomit. Go check out some ipecac if you want to induce vomiting, it's much cheaper.

Underworld by Don DeLillo is a great novel. I know it's long and winding, but the story is fascinating and the prose is excellent. Although the story jumps around chronologically a lot, and from character to character, the author does a good job of tying everything together eventually.

Also, the story contains a fascinating look into the industry of waste management (my former profession), so I found all the details about recycling, landfills, and hazardous waste combustion very interesting.

Like "The Names" and "Ratner's Star," this is one of DeLillo's BIG BOOKS--a fat tome that tries to deal with epic themes and dark titanic forces.

I'm not sure any of the three succeeds entirely, but this one is certainly a masterpiece. Read it for the thrilling prose and wonderful insights into its component parts, even if all the parts don't quite gel.

In "End Zone," DeLillo linked football and nuclear war--in a kind of bleak black comedy. In "Underworld," he joins baseball and nuclear war--but the tone is much darker and more ominous.

And of course there is the ever-present theme of Waste and Waste Disposal.

This isn't the Waste of "The Waste Land"--a desert of the heart. It's the Waste of Too Much Crap--overbusiness, overproduction, over-childishness, all in the service of burying one's true feelings.

A brilliant, though difficult, book.

Quite simply, I found this book to be every bit as enthralling as I've been told. I find it inconceivable that anyone can gripe about length. Can't you see it's a long book by looking at it? Reader's digest is available and recommendable for those of the MTV-generation whose attention spans have waned to the point of boredom at paying attention to anything longer than a six-panel Sunday comic. This is an excellent, if lengthy, novel. (Sorry if this got a bit long.)

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.

This book draws you in with the quality and style of writing which all fans of Delillo can appreciate. The sections where he talks about J Edgar Hoover,the baseball,the stand-up comedian and the guys in the fallout shelter are unforgettable! Utterly brilliant writing!

"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.

Underworld is full of what makes Delillo great: repetitive phrases that resonate like traffic sounds or words in one's head; quirky references to pop culture and American history with relevance to everything and everyone; obscure connections that allways lurk below the surface of an event. His characters, with this book in particular, are given a life with which they talk and argue, love and fight, and look to the future as they remember the past. The descriptive language is amazing. Very well written.

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.

I enjoyed this book. Not what you would call an easy read and a knowledge of the terminology of American baseball would have been handy. Love his writing style and the myriad of characters. I don't think it was profound in any way just a fascinating read about an interesting selection of people. It lived up to expectation after hearing the author inteviewed on the BBC. It was as intelligent and interesting as he was.

A classic example of the sort of book that 'everyone' raves about because they don't want to appear uncool by not doing so. Ignore all the hype and the mad stampede to heap praise upon this - it is, quite simply, tedious and unreadable. The style is turgid and the prose pretentious. It lacks structure and development, and is populated by characters notable only for their forgettableness. Believe me, you have better things to do with your time than waste it on this. Don't let me detain you any longer - we have better books to read.

Yes, I loved this book. And I don't think I've anything to add to all other remarks by enlightened 10's --- but -- have mercy! Couldn't Scribner's have considered publishing it in 3 volumes (like Jane Eyre was first), I can't read it lying in bed, I can't fit it in my perspex recipebook holder I use to lie in bed and read, and I can't get in the bath with it. Yes, the author was right to write a long book -- but can't publishers give a sore back a break!!!

Any American will fall for the first chapter of this book. The scene of the Polo Grounds, the mix of dead icons and working stiffs, everything is brilliant. And then the idea of tracking down the ball is intriguing. But for me it never all came together. Some story lines never led anywhere and others were just beat to death. The book is either 300 pages too long or 200 pages too short.

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.

An amazing novel--an ambitious, highly literary capstone on our troubled American century. DeLillo is a sculptor of language; he seems to choose his words based on the shapes of their letters--this gives his writing an aesthetic quality, a jazziness, a depth that points to hidden mysteries that connect us in a humane, compassionate manner. The closing benediction sequence is one of the most moving pieces of writing I've encountered.

This is a great book. It chronicles the life of the infamous baseball hit by Bobby Thompson, "The shot heard around the World". The book doesn't have much to do with baseball. The images and scenes described by Delilo are so vivid you feel like your watching a movie. It's really a slices of life book. It takes you in many different directions, in many different era's following the lives of the many different owners of the ball. I loved it! It's a project though being 800+ pages, but well worth the time.

I know books like these are supposed to be lauded for their experimental narratives, but I do like a good plot, and I couldn't really find one here.

The nuclear war subplot seemed forced, like DeLillo was trying to make drama out of something mundane. His countless digressions confused me (even if they were courageous), and his "God's eye" viewpoint was exhaustively descriptive, so much that it made me feel claustrophobic, which I believe is the opposite of what the 3rd-person omniscient is supposed to do.

My husband is a huge DeLillo fan (he insists "White Noise" is the best), and he did warn me not to read "Underworld" first. It might be a question of style, but DeLillo's writing isn't a style I enjoy.

"Underworld" begins with a great, great description of the famous 1951 baseball game that propelled the New York Giants into the World Series. The two shots heard round the world that day are the events that launch this novel into the next 50 years of America. Bobby Thompson's game winning home run baseball and the Soviet Union's atomic bomb test are the loose threads that connect the events throughout the book's 827 pages. Through these two seemingly disconnected events author Don DeLillo vividly describes the Cold War paranoia and the changes in American culture.

Tremendous book and a tremendous read. There is a cinematic quality to DeLillo's writing. He is masterful in his descriptions of the characters, their narratives and the settings. However, I do have two minor criticisms. One is that the multiple storylines are written in a non- linear narrative fashion. I don't have a problem with that per se but DeLillo's (many) multiple characters and the movement forward and backwards through the decades made it difficult to connect the storylines. Secondly (and this one is petty), DeLillo's first chapter describing the ball game was so spectacularly brilliant that I was wondering if DeLillo could sustain that level of brilliance over the next 700 pages. Not quite. But "Underworld" is still an ambitious and powerful novel that is well worth investing the time and effort to read.

Don DeLillo is a brilliant writer, but I almost stopped reading his book about a half dozen times because of its raw street language and the despicable, self-centered characters, such as the ones that blithely cheat on their spouses just for a little fun and feel no remorse about it. I'm sure he was trying to build his case for the undercurrent (or `underworld') that goes on around us mostly unnoticed, but it was hard to spend time with people you don't like. A little nobility of character now and then would have been fine with me.

I liked the 1951 `Shot heard round the world' game evocation with engaging, fictitious close-ups of celebs such as Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, and J Edgar Hoover, and the puzzling (at the time) attention given to the trash floating around the stadium. He also hits the high points of the last 50 years such as the Missile Crisis, the political upheavals of the 60's, and the fall of Communism; and he also brings back disquieting memories of the hard-hitting grammar school nuns of the 50's. All of this is more-or-less connected to the 1951 Giants-Dodgers game, an intriguing hook. It was also interesting how he jumped around time-wise; it took the whole book to find out why later information happened as it did with some of the key characters. His description of the Rolling Stones documentary at the height of their outrageousness almost defined post-modernism; I thought it was one of the book's highlights.

Make no mistake about it, DeLillo is a great writer. I just wish he would have made his book PG-13 instead of a heavy R. I liked `White Noise' a lot better.

I finished this book perhaps a year ago. It took me ten months to complete and to be fair, I read it while moving across the country and often set it down for days at a stretch. When I picked it up again, I'd forgotten what was happening.

I intend to go back and give this book better treatment. I kind of want to read it chronologically, in other words, read the different sections of the book in order from the shot heard round the world up through the end. It might make more sense.

Two complaints:

one, the length. I felt like I was reading a compilation of several novels rather than one.

two, the language. Here's an example: "And where do these compressed words come from? They come from remote levels of development, from technicians and bombheads in their computer universe - story, bespectacled men who deal with systems so layered and many-connected that the ensuing arrays of words must be atomized and redesigned, made spare and letter-sleek."

Many-connected?
Letter-sleek?

Barf. These two awkward constructions ruin an otherwise flawless sentence.

On a flight to Libya back in 96, my friend Steve handed me a copy of Harper's. Read this, he said, it's about the best you'll ever read. It was, of course, DeLillo's glorious story "Pafko at the Wall". Later, here it is as the prologue to some of the most verbose, long-winded, meandering drivel of recent years (apart from Salman Rushdie, natch). Does DeLillo even have an editor these days ? Anyway, if you can't get a back issue from Harper's, here's my tip: Borrow the book, photocopy the prologue and treasure it again and again at your leisure.

Awestruck! That's the first word that comes to mind in reading DeLillo's book. As a baby boomer who has lived the history in this book, I view DeLillo as our Charles Dickens. He has created characters that represent the human "types" who have lived in the U.S. over the last 50 years. His creative genius and humor fill the book with surprise and incredible insight. He is a marvel and continually surprises with his creations. Anyone who wants to know what it was like to live in the U.S. over the last fifty years will get the answer by reading Underworld. DeLillo is a ceative genius!

if anyone is expecting neat and tidy closure you will be disappointed. life doesn't work that way and neither does this book. it does however it does however bring us into the lives of several Americans during the Cold War. The lives of these people is the Underworld and we live there too.

I gave up on page 117 of this 824 page tome.

I got that far on faith, hoping it would get better, that I would actually care about the characters, hoping that their dialogue, emotions and actions would start to actually resemble how real people speak, think and act - but no luck!

The famous cameos by Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor, J. Edgar Hoover and Frank Sinatra were probably the least worst part of this book - I'd rather read a novel about those guys then have to wade through this long, self indulgent, poorly edited, verbose tale of a waste management executive and the artist he knew and had some sort of inappropriate relationship with (I didn't stick around long enough to find out what kind of relationship) when he was much younger.

Those characters were just not credible, not filled out at all, there were too many minor characters and they were all annoying and De Lillo gave me no reason whatsoever to actually care about them or their journey.

Also is De Lillo paid by the word or something?

Every scene was padded out with excessive amounts of dialogue and it took three or four pages where a better writer could have used a paragraph.

Is he a graduate of the Steven King School of Doorstop Novels?

I would not recommend buying this book - even if you got it for free, you'd be paying too much!

I'd give this waste of dead trees 0 stars if I could.

I found this to be the most boring book. In fact, I gave up at page 224. Perhaps it really took off on page 225, but by that point I was already brain dead. My neighbor Terri made it all the way through. I am not sure how many months that took, but she is a stud. By the way her husband Tom made it all the way to page 300. Apparently, everyone on our street is just stupid to understand this great literary masterpiece. Anyone got any extra copies of Daniel Steele.

A very disappointing book, and again, makes me very wary of any item on a "New York Times Best Seller List" or any other list, and really any big name reviewer recommendation.

This book has one 50 page chapter which is excellent - the recap of the Thompson "Shot heard around the world" homerun. If you are a baseball fan as I am, that (barely) made the book worthwhile. The other 700 pages are disjoint, incomprehensible, and really trivial. You come away thinking "I really don't care bout this stuff" - I don't care about the dynamics of trash, about J Edgar Hoover's bathroom habits, Klara Sax's artistic depression and annoying infatuations about roof tops, about characters that just don't have much depth to really care about. At the end, even potentially interesting characters like Albert (the one on the baseball quest) become hard to bear. The whole book in fact had the feel of going to a senior citizen home.

I read this book, as perhaps others did, expecting a book about the mafia or about other figures in the underworld. What I got was a book with a good first chapter, some interesting tidbits here and there about how life used to be in the 50's (fear of nuclear weapons, duck and cover classroom exercies), and a lot of knowledge about the trash business.

The "masterful" epilogue, as other reviewers call it, really does no justice to a reader who has spent so much time toiling over Delillo's ragtag story telling. I am ok with stream of consciousness writing, or nonchronological chapters, or even random chapters, but the methods used in thsi book served no purpose other than to further make the reading difficult.

Was this book about how mundane our lives are versus the bigger things that occur around us? Or how each of us is on an individual quest? Or that the 50's-60's-70's-80's were just years of fear, and the 90's are years of greed? I am still unsure, I still don't think any of these themes came across well.

Please - not pretending to be a sophisticate, intellectual, or professional critic - but this book is really not worth the time or effort. You can be staisfied by a number of other books, including the "The Corrections" by Franzen or "The Cold Six Thousand" by Ellroy which cover a similar period or similar themes and do not make you so frustrated or disappointed at the end.

Read the first chapter, then put the book down or you will be sorely disappointed and have wasted an awful lot of time.

The most extraordinary reading experience I've had in years. Underworld is a glorious dark fugue of language and experience that leads not to some comforting, narratively tidy ending, but to where we were at the beginning -- alone with words and what we can recall of a shared history. If people are still reading 100 years from now, this is what they will read.

Herman Melville once wrote that "to produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme." Underworld proves the limitations of that advice. Here is a sprawling American mega-novel (a genre unto itself, really) with the mightiest of themes: Our nations anxious, confused, often amnesiac relationship to its own past.

Delillo filters a massive thematic concern through his own already well developed taste, through a paranoiac sense of the hidden systems and relations which have run the world since the onset of the cold-war and more broadly, of the threat of nuclear Armageddon. It's no coincidence that Underworld is book-ended by a baseball game and an obsessive concern with atomic explosions.

In fact, the writing in Underworld is at its absolute strongest and most focused in these two sections, shifting with huge confidence from a variety of perspectives both high and low and brilliantly evoking a sense of import and menace at who we are as a nation, what we have been, and how quickly we forget the latter.

Unfortunately…there are about 700 pages between these sections in which Delillo's writing becomes wildly uneven. Quite often Underworld doesn't exactly sprawl as much as it simply lays inert for 70-80 pages at a stretch. As if Delillo's energy and imagination sort of petered out for a bit and he simply couldn't be bothered to either cut or flesh out quite a few sections with his usually brilliant observations about the ominous dread of modern life.

Appropriately for a book called "Underworld," the strongest bits tend to be the most seemingly marginal and submerged. Nick Shay, the books nominal protagonist, is just vastly less interesting than a brief section about an aged nun working in a burnt out bronx ghetto, or a description of a painter watching a lost Eisenstein film in a dark theater, or a crazed collector discussing how he tracked down a legendary baseball, etc. That sense of marginality, of blasted landscapes and freaky lives, is the only thing that kept me reading the book. Sadly, that sensability tends to disappear for long stretches while Delillo heaps energy and attention on main characters who are usually so bland and so complacent, that you almost can't believe he would write them at all.

Most modern writers (though not all) who publish big books like this usually do so fairly early in their literary careers. I don't want to generalize too much, but I suspect one reason that happens is that many of them are relatively young, ambitious, and feel like they have something to prove, which are perfectly valid reasons for trying to create something huge and powerful.

Underworld is Don Delillo's 12th novel. He didn't start it until he was in his 60's and was already about as respected as a living American novelist can be. Hell, White Noise itself has probably been assigned reading at nearly every college in the U.S. at one point or another in the last 30 years. There is virtually no living American fiction writer who has been so widely venerated in his own time. I think a big reason that Underworld seems so half-baked and inert so much of the time is that, frankly, Delillo reached his peak years before this was published, and didn't have the hunger or drive to really whip this into something fiercer. Underworld Reeks of self-indulgence.

The book was well written. While most books I completely finish, this book felt like it was dragging on forever with no real story. The book is based on characters and their daily lives, which are very uninteresting. I continued reading until Part III when I decided I just couldn't read further.

I like books. I like books a lot. I have been known to read manuals for heating systems if nothing else is to hand. This said I don't think my critical faculties have suffered and I found "Underworld" completely unreadable. I was disappointed and felt gulled by the glowing reviews on the cover which claimed that it was the best book of the century etc. Unconvinced that I was right in the face of such venerable opposition I lent the mostly unread book to several friends who also found it utterly unreadable. I don't know- maybe you have to be American or at least a baseball fan? A horrible book.

I strongly suspect that the reviewers who didn't like _Underworld_ just didn't get it, and that made them mad. This was the first DeLillo book that I have read and it will not be the last. It is a wonderful novel, broad yet completely connected, written in stunningly beautiful prose. This book will please anyone who is willing to make the journey. Highly recommended.

Like Chuck Palahniuk's hilarious works (Choke, Survivor), a good bit of Delillo's output is drop-dead hilarious, not to mention thought-provoking. I see people from time to time reading both authors' works on the subway or bus, turning page after page without even cracking a smile. I mean, come on, if they don't find this stuff funny, then what the hell DO they find funny? Will Farrel? CBS sitcoms? Saturday Night Live? A depressing thought. I suppose certain people have not formed a close enough relationship with the chaos of existence to "get" Delillo yet, have yet to really ponder over their impending deaths without the salve of their religious fantasies. I don't trust people who claim not to feel angst, malaise, or an undefineable unease. You really have to be in tune with these feelings to appreciate Delillo. Also, what is this mania with "I couldn't relate to the characters" or "His characters are just the mouthpieces for his ideas"? Yeah, so? Let's face it, the nineteenth-century style of spending a few paragraphs to describe a setting or a person is DEAD. If you want that, go read Dickens and such (nothing wrong his ilk, by the way). When all is said and done, it's the ideas that are going to stick in your craw, anyway. So, let's dispense with all the descriptive fluff and get to the heart of the matter. WHITE NOISE is probably the funniest twentieth-century novel I have ever read, with at least five gut-busting passages. I feel sorry for people who don't get it.

I was very disappointed in this effort. The opening bit about Bobby Thompson's homerun bored me to absolute tears. It was cliche-driven, to say the least. Nothing new there. I waded through hundreds of pages before I found anything to really hold my interest, and by that time I'd determined that it just wasn't worth it. Now I have to go back and read Libra and White Noise to make sure I wasn't dreaming when I read those books and thought they were great.

Among the great American novels.

This is my opinion. Not all will like it. It's not for people who read only Turow, Ludlow, or the other stuff always stocking the airport marts.

Guidelines for my taste, other of my favorites include: "Catch-22," "Infinite Jest," "Lonesome Dove," "The Dogs of March," "Cryptonomicon," and many novels by Cormac McCarthy and Jim Thompson.

Sorry, forgot the question mark.
I have an uncle Elmer. He is a family amusement. When I was a young man he used to come to family reunions,funerals and weddings and be quite entertaining. He was most famous for learning a new word from the dictionary each day or a new theory or concept he would vaguely touch upon and share with the younger members.
"So whatcha think about the theory of real-tivity?", Uncle Elmer would pose. Or, "do any of you youngins know what a simulacrum is..hey you over there, Billy, ya know what a simulacrum is?"
We were all as very young children quite impressed with Uncle Elmer -- quite impressed. Well that is of course until we got older and could see through sad uncle Elmer.
We learned uncle Elmer was trying to impress us with this way-with-words and knowledge of the most obscure facts. We learned that he would play with those words, dance with his stories just to mesmerize, to impress, to sound "smart".
How wonderful it would have been for all of us, but mostly for Uncle Elmer, had there been any real "point" or "substance" in his offering.
However,uncle Elmer was an innocent -- insecure and uneducated, but harmless. That is not the case with Mr. Delillo. His wordplay and pretention is a black mark on literature and a damaging offer to those impressed with the uncle Elmers of this world and impressed with this gibberish!
And that is the end of my very sad review.

I cannot recall when I have come across such a jewel as this. WOW. The reader will sit, anxiously willing to traverse the smoke rings of the subconcious, with DeLillo as your guide......and I can think of none better to prod at the inner workings of the human condition

"The plot was hard to follow. There was no plot." pg. 430.

Astonishingly poetic. Astonishingly clumsy. At times laser-like insights embedded in a jumbled episodic disorder. Its depends on the reader's mood. Never quite understood what the trip was about but mostly counted it well worth the time.

From the opening line to the last word, this is a book filled with the beauty of language, the tragedy of everyday life. It's stunning: it has cadences that will take your breath away -- exclamations and ideas that will render you silent . I love this book beyond all reason, it will move you.

A dense, impenetrable and ultimately dull, directionless novel. Perhaps I don't "get" it because I don't live in America, never have, and never will, but this whole bloated affront to forests just rubs me the wrong way. It takes fifty pages for some kid to get to a damn baseball game, and it's downhill from there.

The Great American Novel has been written -- again. DeLillo's Underworld is that book. In its scope, in its multiple and intertwined plot lines, in its uniquely American approach to universal themes, Underworld is simply the greatest novel since Moby Dick. It's also a pure joy for any lover of the language to read.

I've had this book for over two months now and I'm still in page 300. And I read quite a lot and quite fast. Yes, this book is beautifully written, some could say it is an 800 page long poem. But there's little story, a fractured narrative and unintresting characters. This is a prime example of literary masturbation. All style and no substance.

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.

An unreadable book. Bits and pieces stretched out over 800 pages that never add up to a whole. To use DeLillo's garbage theme: it was like finding litter on a sidewalk. Each piece once meant something, but who knows what.

I finished it because I had read so many good reviews that I thought there must be something worthy in it. Sometimes a book is torture and then everything comes together at the end. Not in this case. Torture for 800 pages and then poof! DeLillo tidies everything up in an epilogue. Nice scenes and nice sentences and BIG ideas don't necessarily make a book a worthwhile read.

It was my first DeLillo book and it will probably be my last.

It took me from March to May to read and it will stay with me forever. The '13' concept blew my mind. I didnt get all of it, but loved all of it. I'll never look at Lucky Strikes in the same way again.

I just don't get these post-modern "novels". This book seemed to be missing something....like a plot..or a story. I couldn't get beyond the first few chapters, and kept asking myself "Why was this book written, and what the heck is going on?" I don't know what the big fuss is about for this one. I think it's an insult to real novels to even call this a novel. I've read many long books before (Winds of War, War and Remembrance, even Atlas Shrugged). Those were quite readable. If the NY Times thought this book was so hot, perhaps it's is a harbinger of the demise of our civilization.

I'm not of fan of most contemporary fiction. I tell that to most people and they inevitably have the, "Oh, but you probably haven't read such and such." I walk away from these conversations with doubt but that little piece of hope in me that is always open to finding Faulkner before everyone knew who he was. I rarely turn a recommendation down. I feel I owe it to the "for argument's sake" conversations I'll always be exposed to in the future. That's why I read Underworld. I have read White Noise and was underwhelmed, but I thought there was potential enough in it that this recommendation could pan out. Wrong. It's a good book. I'm not interested in "good books." I never feel close with DeLillo's characters; they feel like props and puppets and are always missing that human quality that always goes hand in hand with great writing. For instance, I feel closer to Quentin Compson than I do with most of my closest friends.

Of all the recommendations from contemporary fiction that did something for me, only two stand out: Cormac McCarthy and Mark Helprin; both are outstanding and easily the best American writers out there. I think just for that reason I leave the door open for contemporary writers to prove me wrong and I'll read just about anything somebody recommends to me, hoping to find another McCarthy or Helprin.

I gave up on page 117 of this 824 page tome. I got that far on faith, hoping it would get better, that I would actually care about the characters, hoping that their dialogue, emotions and actions would start to actually resemble how real people speak, think and act - but no luck! The famous cameos by Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor, J. Edgar Hoover and Frank Sinatra were probably the least worst part of this book - I'd rather read a novel about them then have to wade through this long, self indulgent, poorly edited, verbose tale of a waste management executive and the artist he knew when he was much younger.

Those characters were just not credible, not filled out at all and De Lillo gave me no reason whatsoever to actually care about them or their journey.

Also is De Lillo paid by the word or something?

Every scene was padded out with excessive amounts of dialogue and it took three or four pages where a better writer could have used a paragraph.

I would not recommend buying this book - even if you got it for free, you'd be paying too much!

Yes, the baseball game in the opening section is interestingly described but this book was so boring, I stopped reading it halfway through for the sake of my sanity!
Life is too short for this kind of pretentious, over-hyped, long drawn out waste of time.

As Mr. Lincoln once said, " People who like this sort of thing, will find this the sort of thing they like".

My wife, a fan and American Studies major, loved it. I on the other hand found myself wishing that Patrick O'Brian were still alive.

The first chapter is the best section of the book, but was basically meaningless since I do not believe that baseball embodies Mystical American Goodness.

You will like this book if you are a Delillo fan, or believe that the literary critics know something that you don't. If not, life is short, find something else.

I received this great, heavy book from someone who mistook me for jaded or goofy enough to enjoy it, apparently. Something is amiss with language if DeLillo's work is critiqued as genius. My guess is that 'genius' is French for 'Annoying, Yet Still Boring'. I read thru this pile as a perverse exercise, perhaps atoning for sins in my past lives. It was with great pleasure that, as voluminous as it was, I transformed it into a jolly good door stop. The novelty wore off, alas, and I dropped it in my library's return bin as if it belonged there. For this, I apologize.

A year it had dozed on my shelf or on my floor, grey-grey, consuming the immediate space to its left and to its right. Briefly halting the steady-Eddie scan of my eye - from left to right or from right to left - from time to time.
It was eight hundred and twenty seven pages long.
I read it on the bus or on the train or at my desk with a white plastic coffee cup. Number 53. Strong. Douwe Egberts. White with sugar. The woman from the other desk asked me what I was reading and said is it any good and said we are going to have lunch and said do you want to come?
It was eight hundred and twenty seven pages long with seven hundred and eighty one pages of character introduction.
The woman from the other desk was from Peru, Indiana. And she lived in what she called an `affordable' bungalow' with a man who she said was her `dear other half'. His first name was a name that was Jules or Julian or Julius. He was an electrical engineer and maybe I'll write a bit about his mother and the nun who taught him to read at school. She really has nothing to do with anything but it would make me a clever and interesting writer - a storytelling genius, in fact - and so would repeating random little sections of text and willful placing of the word `and'.
It was eight hundred and twenty seven pages long with seven hundred and eighty one pages of character introduction. And after those seven hundred and eighty one pages were finished I simply didn't care about the characters.
I looked out of my dusty-musty window and I had to force myself to read on. And the ending?
Peace.

I paid a quarter for this book at the library sale and would have been better off getting some gumdrops. After 125 pages, I gave up. We all know about Thomson's famous home run so why devote 80 pages to an event that has been chronicled to death? Don DeLillo strikes me as the kind of author who writes to impress himself with his bloated prose but has no interest in telling in a story. When the book shifts from 1951 to 1992, we find ourselves in the Arizona desert with two ex-lovers on the wrong side of 50 and 70 who hadn't seen each other in years conversing like it was just yesterday. The dialog is pure drivel and there's no plot movement, just a lot of boring description and lame attempts to fill in the back story. What kind of name is Klara Sax anyway? Great novels should capture your interest within the first few pages. Take Thomas Hardy, for example. In a few paragraphs of The Mayor of Casterbridge, the reader is drawn into an amazing tale of sin and redemption. By the way, the Giants lost the World Series to the Yankees in 1951, a fact that's all but forgotten in the wake of Thomson's historic blast.

Déjà vu! That's my reaction to Underworld, and unfortunately it's not good.

About 100 pages into the novel the slow burning realization finally hits home: I've read this before.

Maybe a dozen years ago, I read this novel and do not remember any characters, plot, image, scene, or dialogue. Only when rereading certain sections did I begin to admit "Oh yeah, this sounds vaguely naggingly familiar." Nothing specific. Simply a general feeling I've been bored by all this before.

What a sad commentary on a book to remember nothing about it. Or is that a reflection on me?

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

I made it all the way through, which was an accomplishment. It is beautifully written, but about all I can tell you about it is that it is about a baseball. And a lot of other stuff. I really liked White Noise and Libra, but this book is a lot more obscure.

Did anyone mention that the cover photograph on this book is an eerie portent of a world-changing event that happens a few years after DeLillo published his novel?

Look closely at the clouds-high skyscraper presumably in New York City with a crucifix on a church in the foreground. Note what-looks-like a bird flying towards the top floors of the skyscraper.

Does this remind you what went down in NYC on September 11, 2011?

I found the book to be written in a manner that was unreadable and unintelligible. The book is written in English but that's as much as I can say about it. I got as far as page 4 before deciding I had enough confusion in my life without adding to it. How anyone can turn out writing like this and have the critics praising it is a mystery to me.

OK SPOILER ALERT. First, I've not read this book but I think from the summary and my knowledge of literature I can understand what the author is doing. He's basically writing in cinematic style, popular in the 19th century before movies, to give the reader the feeling that he's 'right there'. Fine. But here's the spoiler, from a physics point of view: the atomic bomb is actually quite survivable. No I'm serious. Radiation can be absorbed by the human body a lot more than people think, and if there was a nuclear war, millions might die, but then again it might be only a few million not 100s of millions. Depending on the number of explosions, some of the rest would have radiation sickness but even so they would reproduce without too many problems and life goes on. Birth defects would increase but not as much as people popularly suppose. This was hypothesized by early military planners and that's why some advocated using nuclear weapons in the US military. Subsequent research has found it to be true. But of course I'm happy they did not use the Bomb. Just saying. Yes I'm familiar with the science and the politics too (Union of Concerned Scientists, inter alia). I hope this does not spoil the book for you, but it's the truth.

Some American writers, dazzled by the novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries, seem to think that to make a great book you only need to fill hundreds of pages with endless, tedious descriptions and hollow dialogues. They do not seem to think that any especial literary ability (such as imagination or psychological insight) is required. DeLillo is a nice example of this kind of writers. Thus, whereas The Magic Mountain and War and Peace are literary wonders, Underworld is simply unbearable. The prose is beautiful and carefully worked, but it is absolutely not enough to make a good novel. My recommendation to writers: if you are not Thomas Mann or Leo Tolstoy, either stick to the 200 pages or find an interesting story to tell.