While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the cold war and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand. "It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria. Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled.


From Library Journal
On October 3, 1951, there occurred two "shots heard round the world"?Bobby Thomson's last-minute homer, which sent the N.Y. Giants into the World Series, and a Soviet atomic bomb test. The fallout from these two events provides the nexus for this sagalike rumination on the last 50 years of American cultural history. DeLillo's opening depiction of the scene at the N.Y. Polo Grounds that day is masterly. Unfortunately, sustaining the initial brilliance proves difficult. There are some marvelously drawn characters?Sister Edgar, a vision-seeking nun of the old school; Ismael, a ghetto-based graffiti artist and budding capitalist; J. Edgar Hoover?and thought-provoking ideas, e.g., waste as the cornerstone of civilization and the power of remembered images lurking just beneath the surface of our minds. But somehow the various parts of the story seem more satisfying than the whole. DeLillo is one of our most gifted contemporary authors whose works belong in all academic and public libraries, yet one suspects that his truly "great" novel is yet to come.-?David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Entertainment Weekly
Spanning five decades and using recurrent images (garbage, graffiti, a smudged baseball) to link dozens of vignettes and characters, the mammoth new novel by Don DeLillo ... takes for its subject nothing less than the complete Cold War. But though Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam haunt its pages, as do oil embargoes, student riots, and the arms race, Underworld is not a political novel. It is a black comedy about the psychic fallout of nuclear terror: what it felt like to exist year after year with the knowledge that "every privilege in your life and every thought in your mind depends on the ability of the two great powers to hang a threat over the planet."


New York Times Book Review, Michiko Kakutani
... [an] astonishing new novel.... Underworld is an amazing performance, a novel that encompasses some five decades of history.... Showcased as well are his razzle-dazzle talents as a writer: his gift for surreal, dead-on dialogue; his jazzy, synesthetic prose; and his cinematic ability to convey the simultaneity of experience...


From AudioFile
Few books are given the tender loving care that Dennis Boutsikaris gives Underworld. And this book needs it. Its ambition is to explore the American sensibility during the Cold War. DeLillo is a fine, absorbing writer and complex thinker who seeks a thread uniting everything in our culture from our most superficial symbols and pastimes to our most desperate needs. Few readers strive to give us a sense of a novel's architecture of plot, its manipulation of tension and rise to a climax, much less its architecture of ideas. But Boutsikaris has done his homework. His insight is apparent in every line, not only for its immediate meaning and personality, but for its relationship to the whole. Having done so, he then proceeds to use his strong, youthful voice and mastery of technique to deliver a seemingly effortless and deeply expressive rendering of some mighty fine writing. A benchmark performance that others should aspire to equal. Y.R. Winner of AUDIOFILE's Earphones Award (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
DeLillo always writes large, but here he has reached new dimensions as he taps into all the terrifying and confounding forces unleashed by the inception of the nuclear age. His stylistically magnificent, many-voiced, and soulful novel begins on October 3, 1951, at New York's Polo Grounds, where the decisive game in the race for the pennant between the legendary Giants and Dodgers is taking place, the same day the Soviet Union detonates an atom bomb. It's a spectacular scene, and DeLillo is everywhere: the announcer's booth where Russ Hodges is losing his voice; the stands where a young truant named Cotter is catching his breath after jumping the turnstile; the box seat where J. Edgar Hoover and friends exchange small talk and insults; and on the field, where baseball history is being made, and the unifying symbol of the story, the ball hit into the stands in the game-winning home run, begins its talismanic journey. As DeLillo zooms in on each sphere of action, and each psyche, he achieves an unsurpassed intensity of sensory and psychological detail, which is rendered with exquisite tenderness. He never once loses this quality, this warmth and sorrow, as the narrative sways back and forth in time, and as more and more compelling characters and situations are introduced. There's Nick Shay, a waste-management expert burdened by a violent past; Klara Sax, an artist creating a monumental work in the middle of the desert out of decommissioned B-52s; and incendiary genius Lenny Bruce. Like novelists E. L. Doctorow and Thomas Pynchon, DeLillo uses historical figures to great effect, but DeLillo is a far more emotive and spiritual writer, and Underworld is a ravishingly beautiful symphony of a novel. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Working at the top of his form, DeLillo draws on his previous novels (Mao II, 1991, Libra, 1988, etc.) in shaping his most ambitious work yet, a grand Whitmanesque epic of postwar American life--a brainy, streetwise, and lyrical underground history of our times, full of menace and miracles, and humming with the bop and crackle of postmodern life. DeLillo's bottom-up chronicle is also the history of garbage, from a rubble-strewn lot in the Bronx to nuclear waste dumps in the Southwest. And the true-blue American who spans these landscapes is one Nick Shay, now an executive with a waste-management firm, once a j.d. on the not-so-mean streets, where his father kept book and his mother worried her rosary for her two boys, the other a chess prodigy who later lends his mathematical genius to the weapons industry. From the '50s on, DeLillo's always accessible narrative is also the history of a baseball, the one that was the ``Shot Heard Round the World,'' Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning home run in 1951. The fate of the actual ball, a relic of spiritual significance, seemingly lost, is also a lesson in enterprise. Snagged by a young black kid from Harlem, who identifies with Thomson's Homeric homer, the ball quickly becomes an object of commerce, purloined by the boy's desperate father. Eventually, Nick acquires it, but for him it more properly commemorates failure: Branca's losing pitch. Beyond garbage and baseball, DeLillo surveys the Cold War years with a satirist's eye for meaningful detail and a linguist's ear for existential patter. Sweeping in scope and design, incorporating such diverse figures as Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover, DeLillo's masterpiece shouts against the times in the language of the times: postmodernism against itself. He kicks the rock of reality, teases out the connectedness of things, and leaves us in awe. (Film rights to Scott Rudin/Paramount; Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club main selections; author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
Malcolm Jones Newsweek There's pleasure on evey page of this pitch-perfect evocation of a half-century.

Joan Mellen The Baltimore Sun Underworld is a page-turner and a masterwork, a sublime novel and a delight to read.

Greg Burkman The Seattle Times Masterpieces teach you how to read them, and Underworld is no exception....Anastonishing piece of prose and a benchmark of twentieth-century fiction, Underworld is stunnigly beautiful in its generous humanity, locating the true power of history not in tyranny, collective political movements of history books, but inside each of us.


Review
Michael Ondaatje The book is an aria and a wolf-whistle of our half century. It contains multitudes.


Review
Michael Ondaatje The book is an aria and a wolf-whistle of our half century. It contains multitudes.


Book Description

Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life; she is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep, clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times -- Don DeLillo's greatest and most powerful work of fiction.


About the Author
Don DeLillo is the author of eleven novels, including White Noise, Libra, and Mao II, and has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

FROM OUR EDITORS

One was a book that everyone was reading: Don DeLillo's Underworld. I'd read the first chapter, then titled "Pafko at the Wall," when it was published in Harper's in 1993 and presumed that it was a self-contained novella (a brilliant one, the best fiction about baseball ever written and, I'm happy to admit, a piece that taught me all kinds of stuff that I was able to use in my own novel, The Veracruz Blues). When I heard that DeLillo had subsumed this masterpiece into a much longer novel, I could barely wait for its publication. The Friday the book came out, I stood outside the door of my local bookstore while a clerk opened the just-delivered boxes. I went home that weekend and read the book greedily, awestruck, afraid, and stunned by DeLillo's paranoid wonderland of material and technique. Underworld is that rare, big, advertised-as-good-for-you novel that makes good on its promises. Even better, I had the pleasure of being the first kid on my block to have read it, which I have spent the last few weeks lording over the many friends of mine who are now in the middle of the thing (I should not be proud of this, I know; sue me).

—Mark Winegardner

ANNOTATION

Don DeLillo was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize for a writer whose work expresses the theme of freedom of the individual in society.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Don DeLillo's novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome - the home run that wins the game is called the "Shot Heard Round the World" - shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb. The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, generates the narrative that follows. It takes the reader deeply into the lives of Nick and Klara and into modern memory and the soul of American culture - from Bronx tenements to grand ballrooms to a B-52 bombing raid over Vietnam. A generation's master spirits come and go. Lenny Bruce cracking desperate jokes, Mick Jagger with his devil strut, J. Edgar Hoover in a sexy leather mask. And flashing in the margins of ordinary life are the curiously connected materials of the culture. Condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs, and miracle sites on the Web. Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

In DeLillo's newest...luminaries gathered in a box at the New York Polo Grounds to watch the Dodgers and the Giants battle it out for the pennant receive word that the Russians are testing an atomic bomb. DeLillo then flashes forward through a half-century of the Cold War as seen through the eyes of two protagonists briefly united by their passionate affair. BOMC and Quality Paperback Book Club main selections.

AudioFile - Yuri Rasovsky

Few books are given the tender loving care that Dennis Boutsikaris gives Underworld. And this book needs it. Its ambition is to explore the American sensibility during the Cold War. DeLillo is a fine, absorbing writer and complex thinker who seeks a thread uniting everything in our culture from our most superficial symbols and pastimes to our most desperate needs. Few readers strive to give us a sense of a novel￯﾿ﾽs architecture of plot, its manipulation of tension and rise to a climax, much less its architecture of ideas. But Boutsikaris has done his homework. His insight is apparent in every line, not only for its immediate meaning and personality, but for its relationship to the whole. Having done so, he then proceeds to use his strong, youthful voice and mastery of technique to deliver a seemingly effortless and deeply expressive rendering of some mighty fine writing. A benchmark performance that others should aspire to equal. Y.R. Winner of AUDIOFILE￯﾿ﾽs Earphones Award ￯﾿ﾽAudioFile, Portland, Maine

Joan Mellen - Baltimore Sun

A page-turner and a masterwork.

Melvin Jules Bukiet - Chicago Tribune

Utterly extraordinary....In its epic ambition and accomplishment, Underworld calls out for comparison with works...that have defined the consciousness of their age.

Greg Burkman - Seattle Times

An astonishing piece of prose and a benchmark of 20th-century fiction, Underworld is stunningly beautiful in its generous humanity.Read all 10 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

"Underworld a magnificant book by an American master." — Salman Rushdie