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3.88 AVERAGE
3.88 AVERAGE
I loved it. The opening section definitely is a skilled piece of writing and the book never lives up to that pace, instead it widens its field of view and divides it attention to America and the heart of its problems. I love DeLillo's style, it's a little like stream of consciousness by someone who is hyper observant to significant details and the/a voice permeates the book and every character. My biggest bone to pick is that this diminished the voice of the characters and made them all a bit samey. There is a lot of powerful imagery, SPOILER------> the juxtaposition of a murderer unable to comprehend the violent forces of his act and his analyst unpacking his demons (both detached from the actual horror of the event) and the immediate opening of the next chapter in which a woman is making Lemon Jell-O Chicken Mousse and lists the ingredients one by one, including MAYO! was great. I won't pick it apart and think it out for you, but that is magnificent writing.
challenging
dark
funny
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Underworld soars through the second-half of the 20th Century, much like the baseball smacked by Bobby Thompson that provides the fantastic 50-ish page opening for the book: In this intro, we follow the characters through the chaos — from the kids jumping the turnstiles, to the celebrities in the stands, to J. Edward Hoover hearing about the Soviet test bomb for the first time — all in an effort to locate the origin of the home-run ball once it left the park.
Underworld really earns it stripes in its postmodern nature, a sort of cacophony of major events that take place after the dropping of the first atomic bomb and everything it leads to:
“Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits… violence is undone, violence is easier now, it’s uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values.”
On its surface, Underworld follows the trajectory of Thompson’s historic home run, as it exchanges hands from person to person, each with their own background, until it eventually lands in the hands of Nick Shay, whose backstory is just as interesting as anyone before him.
“Their stories would be exalted, absorbed by something larger, the long arching journey of the baseball itself and his owne cockeyed march through the decades.”
Shay is constantly mourning the disappearance of his father, who left for a pack of lucky strikes (one of the many brands that harken to an earlier age of ad men) and never returned. In his mind, Shay envisions his father disappearing in a more heroic way, say through the Mafia, but that is unlikely the case.
But Shay’s real grounding in this work is his occupation as a seller of waste. It’s perhaps the most obvious metaphor for the book, waste and waste management: “Garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste… it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art music, mathematics.
This waste management defines the postmodern age, whether that be the booming population with unnecessary products spilling into landfills, or the constant bombardment of television advertisements and product pushing and news dumping that turn our brains into mush.
“When [the TV] was running he could not turn away from it. When it wasn’t running he never thought about it.”
And it sheds light on Klara Sax’s fantastic project in the Mojave Desert, turning old B-52s and other waste into an art form: “we took junk and saved it for art. Which sounds nobler than it was. It was just a way of looking at something more carefully. And I’m still doing it, only deeper maybe.”
It’s this overlap with art and war, with weapons of mass-destruction both in secret and out in the open, that is the constant push-and-pull contradiction that makes up both Underworld and the post-WW2 societies we’ve created. In that way, it’s a perfect complement to Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s postmodern masterpiece, which in many ways led to the themes of the Underworld — a mess of noise swimming in its own mass-produced shit.
Underworld is so many things, a paranoid puzzle that takes place adjacent to the Cuban Missile Crisis, an escape into the nostalgia of the past through its obsessions with baseball, a superstitious conspiracy with the constant, if illogical, surfacing of 13, and above all a reckoning with the world we created — one that is atomically violence and threatening, with radioactive garbage piling up around us, what is one to do with it all, besides make money like Nick or make art like Klara?
And this book is about what we do with what’s leftover from such a chaotic half-century: Waste is a “dark multiplying byproduct… the devil twin. Because waste is the secret history, the understory… What we excrete comes back to consume us.”
And the baseball, perhaps, is a stand in for waste’s opposite, “an expensive and beautiful object that I keep half hidden, maybe because I tend to forget why I bought it… a beautiful thing smudged green near the Spalding trademark nand bronzed with nearly half a century of art and sweat and chemical change, nad I put it back and forget it until next time.”
A perfectly imperfect metaphor for both the latter 20th century and this book.
Underworld really earns it stripes in its postmodern nature, a sort of cacophony of major events that take place after the dropping of the first atomic bomb and everything it leads to:
“Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits… violence is undone, violence is easier now, it’s uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values.”
On its surface, Underworld follows the trajectory of Thompson’s historic home run, as it exchanges hands from person to person, each with their own background, until it eventually lands in the hands of Nick Shay, whose backstory is just as interesting as anyone before him.
“Their stories would be exalted, absorbed by something larger, the long arching journey of the baseball itself and his owne cockeyed march through the decades.”
Shay is constantly mourning the disappearance of his father, who left for a pack of lucky strikes (one of the many brands that harken to an earlier age of ad men) and never returned. In his mind, Shay envisions his father disappearing in a more heroic way, say through the Mafia, but that is unlikely the case.
But Shay’s real grounding in this work is his occupation as a seller of waste. It’s perhaps the most obvious metaphor for the book, waste and waste management: “Garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste… it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art music, mathematics.
This waste management defines the postmodern age, whether that be the booming population with unnecessary products spilling into landfills, or the constant bombardment of television advertisements and product pushing and news dumping that turn our brains into mush.
“When [the TV] was running he could not turn away from it. When it wasn’t running he never thought about it.”
And it sheds light on Klara Sax’s fantastic project in the Mojave Desert, turning old B-52s and other waste into an art form: “we took junk and saved it for art. Which sounds nobler than it was. It was just a way of looking at something more carefully. And I’m still doing it, only deeper maybe.”
It’s this overlap with art and war, with weapons of mass-destruction both in secret and out in the open, that is the constant push-and-pull contradiction that makes up both Underworld and the post-WW2 societies we’ve created. In that way, it’s a perfect complement to Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s postmodern masterpiece, which in many ways led to the themes of the Underworld — a mess of noise swimming in its own mass-produced shit.
Underworld is so many things, a paranoid puzzle that takes place adjacent to the Cuban Missile Crisis, an escape into the nostalgia of the past through its obsessions with baseball, a superstitious conspiracy with the constant, if illogical, surfacing of 13, and above all a reckoning with the world we created — one that is atomically violence and threatening, with radioactive garbage piling up around us, what is one to do with it all, besides make money like Nick or make art like Klara?
And this book is about what we do with what’s leftover from such a chaotic half-century: Waste is a “dark multiplying byproduct… the devil twin. Because waste is the secret history, the understory… What we excrete comes back to consume us.”
And the baseball, perhaps, is a stand in for waste’s opposite, “an expensive and beautiful object that I keep half hidden, maybe because I tend to forget why I bought it… a beautiful thing smudged green near the Spalding trademark nand bronzed with nearly half a century of art and sweat and chemical change, nad I put it back and forget it until next time.”
A perfectly imperfect metaphor for both the latter 20th century and this book.
The prologue describing the 1951 Dodgers-Giants tiebreaker and 'shot heard 'round the world' was fantastic, one of my favorite things I've read in a while.
As for the other 800 pages of the book, I was usually torn. The idea of the 'plot' (if it can be called one) moving back through time and filling in missing pieces was interesting, but seemingly important paths were often abandoned as DeLillo waxed poetic about whatever thought evidently entered his mind at the given moment. The book ends with one of the most blatant word vomits I've read in a long time.
Nonetheless, it was still an engaging read if you're into character exposition over consistent/satisfying plot lines. The development of his themes was at times great, and at other times overwrought. It's likely one of those books I will look back on and enjoy more in retrospect than consistently throughout reading it.
As for the other 800 pages of the book, I was usually torn. The idea of the 'plot' (if it can be called one) moving back through time and filling in missing pieces was interesting, but seemingly important paths were often abandoned as DeLillo waxed poetic about whatever thought evidently entered his mind at the given moment. The book ends with one of the most blatant word vomits I've read in a long time.
Nonetheless, it was still an engaging read if you're into character exposition over consistent/satisfying plot lines. The development of his themes was at times great, and at other times overwrought. It's likely one of those books I will look back on and enjoy more in retrospect than consistently throughout reading it.
There is an important reason why Underworld is written from future to past. The artist in the desert, painting a deactivated aircraft from the cold war times, is trying to process the past from a nation that is lost to time. Such an understanding must arise from the creation of meaning to fill in the gaps, as she does with the pin-up girl left as a souvenir in the B-52. What she tries to process is as much the story of a nation in the uncertain limbo between the ending of an era and the start of a new one, where things just do not seem real, as she remarks, as it is about herself, and a past that cannot be recalled, even if it made her as she is today, as well as the man who comes searching for it in her in 1992.
History can only be understood by walking backwards in time. What explains each scar is a story that is not told upright, but hidden in between every line. Underworld follows DeLillo's usual tropes of dialogue, where everything that's important is everything that is not mentioned. It's just not possible to understand the paranoia of nuclear threat, you have to live under it. Yet this is what we try, to make sense of everything that's happening. This is why the story is told backwards: the reason behind every event lies in something happening just before that. Underworld is a story about a nation just how it is about each one of its inhabitants.
That's why I find this book so incredibly dense and hard to read. Every part has enough content to be a standalone book, but every line is meaningless if not attached to a before and after. Such complex relationships are multisided, revealing something that does not concern only those immediately involved. That's why Nick Shay is allowed to hold the ball from the shot heard round the world, and to claim it is a symbol of defeat.
History can only be understood by walking backwards in time. What explains each scar is a story that is not told upright, but hidden in between every line. Underworld follows DeLillo's usual tropes of dialogue, where everything that's important is everything that is not mentioned. It's just not possible to understand the paranoia of nuclear threat, you have to live under it. Yet this is what we try, to make sense of everything that's happening. This is why the story is told backwards: the reason behind every event lies in something happening just before that. Underworld is a story about a nation just how it is about each one of its inhabitants.
That's why I find this book so incredibly dense and hard to read. Every part has enough content to be a standalone book, but every line is meaningless if not attached to a before and after. Such complex relationships are multisided, revealing something that does not concern only those immediately involved. That's why Nick Shay is allowed to hold the ball from the shot heard round the world, and to claim it is a symbol of defeat.
DeLillo’s big one. The most recent edition includes an afterword from DeLillo in 2015 that perfectly reflects how I experienced the book while reading it. While it tackles the big existential questions DeLillo spent his life considering, the STRUCTURE of Underworld is what makes it special. Lesser DeLillo books, in my opinion, kind of unravel by the end, but Underworld tightens you in a vise grip until the end of the epilogue. It’s amazing how much work structure does in Underworld. All in all, I’d say it’s second only to Libra in DeLillo’s work.
I can be fairly brief about this book: I just didn’t like it. Take the prologue: 60 pages of verbal acrobatics about a baseball game in 1951 that forty years later stills appeals to the imagination. I agree: DeLillo cleverly uses every literary trick in the book to achieve the same effect as a spectacular opening scene in a movie, that continues to vibrate on your retina for hours. But according to me, it's not appropriate to do that with prose, just let each medium/art retain its own strength. And then there is this cliché to zoom in on cult figures like Frank Sinatra or J. Edgar Hoover, who also happen to be in the stadium and have all kinds of reflections on the Cold War.
What follows is a meandering, kaleidoscopic novel in which both the baseball match as the Cold War are the connecting elements: it's so artificial that it seems like DeLillo wanted to show off: "look how ingenious I can make things..." and forgets that there also has to be some content. No, this book really was wasted on me (so I confess I didn't finish it).
What follows is a meandering, kaleidoscopic novel in which both the baseball match as the Cold War are the connecting elements: it's so artificial that it seems like DeLillo wanted to show off: "look how ingenious I can make things..." and forgets that there also has to be some content. No, this book really was wasted on me (so I confess I didn't finish it).
Waste is one of the central themes of Underworld and it certainly feels that way seeing how many completely arbitrary scenes and chapters exist in this book that any sane editor would have cut right out. For every brilliant chapter and for every genius paragraph there is an equal, if not greater, amount of waste in Underworld, and maybe that's the point that Delillo wanted to make. Either way, I would not claim that the brief moments of greatness are worth the whole thing, if the book had been maybe 300 pages shorter I might have given it a stronger recommendation.
Okay, I really don't get the hype about this book. To me it is a lot of words that say very little, page after page of very little. There are moments where I thought great this is starting to go somewhere but as soon as that thought was finished DeLillo jumps to another part/character/time and the thread is lost. I don't know whether it's just how I read or how my mind works but I am not a fan of this kind of ad-hoc so called non-linear writing but I'm sure somewhere in this epic novel there is a story that many will (and for all accounts do) enjoy, however I am not one of them.