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3.88 AVERAGE
3.88 AVERAGE
emotional
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Having read White Noise just before I picked up Underworld, it took me some time to get used to the differences in DeLillo's writing between these two books. Where White Noise is to-the-point, punchy, and almost slapstick in its humor (albeit still quite a sad story at a deeper level) Underworld is sprawling, epic, and drawn the hell out in the best way possible. When I hear about Underworld in conversation, it is usually compared to the other long-ass post-modern great novels of the latter half of the 20th century: Gravity's Rainbow, and, of course, Infinite Jest. The issue with long novels (I've read IJ, not GR) is that unless you are a tremendously attentive reader, it can be difficult to say what these books are about. Infinite Jest, in my reading, is about entertainment, drugs, sports, and America. And this bugs me, that I can sum up a 1000 page novel to a few words. But with Underworld, it is a different story. Sure, I can say it is about bombs, baseball, garbage, and also America, but I can understand it beyond that. The messages that DeLillo so masterfully conveys here are not clouded in pages on pages of filler. Everything is poignant. The point I'm trying to make, here, is that Underworld deserves to be 827 pages-- and this is a nearly impossible thing to do (especially for me, a reader who is obsessed with concision). I can assuredly say that I'll be thinking about this one for quite a while. DeLillo is brilliant.
challenging
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
When Don DeLillo’s nearly-thousand-page opus Underworld appeared in 1998, it was seen by many as the American author’s magnum opus, a capstone to his mature career as a novelist that had begun in the previous decade with great novels like White Noise and Libra. As a fan of much of DeLillo’s output, Underworld strikes me instead as something of a failure, albeit with some memorable and engaging moments.
The heart of Underworld’s plot is the life of Nick Shay, told in a reverse chronology from the 1990s when he is in his late fifties and a successful executive in an Arizona waste-management company, to the 1950s when he is a teenager in the Bronx. Readers soon learn that Nick spent some time in prison as a young man, and thus we are essentially working back to the revelation of the crime that he committed.
As the novel proceeds, it jumps back several years at a time, and ultimately DeLillo aims to paint a grand canvas of American life across that half century. Thus, the prologue of the novel retells the famous Dodgers–Yankees baseball game of October 5, 1951 (“the shot heard around the world”), which just happened to be the same day that the USSR announced its second atomic bomb test. There is a scene in the 1960s where J. Edgar Hoover clashes with hippies. DeLillo shows us both a 1980s Bronx, heavily African-American and Latino and hit hard by the crack epidemic, and a Bronx from decades earlier that was still dominated by Italian and Jewish families. A side character spends years traveling the USA in search of a piece of baseball memorabilia, and characters grow old and die (or rather, are show standing at death’s door before later being reintroduced to the reader in their prime of youth.) These vignettes take us far from the Shay story, and though some of the side characters have a connection to Shay, it is often tenuous.
As I made my way through Underworld, I was reminded of Philip J. Roth’s claim, “To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really.” This is especially applicable to DeLillo’s big book, because if one reads too slowly, one is likely to lose track of some of the thematic connections and intricate relationships between characters that DeLillo constructs. Yet ultimately some of the side plots did not feel fully fleshed out to me, and Underworld really could have been trimmed to a shorter, more manageable novel without any loss of its powerful aspects.
Those familiar with DeLillo’s style from his immediately preceding novels will find that his interest in late-twentieth-century American consumerism, sensationalist media, and information overload is continued here, though not quite to White Noise levels. An especial interest of DeLillo’s is the rubbish that American families procedure – its volume increasing along with consumerism – and how an entire industry exists to deal with that which we have used up and is of no further use to us. Through Shay’s role as a waste-management company executive, readers are shown landfills and nuclear waste disposal sites, forms of burial that give the novel’s title one of its multiple meanings. DeLillo also riffs on the phenomenon by which tabloid news claims that the Virgin Mary appears on a piece of toast or whatever (in this case, a slain ghetto child’s face is seen in a highway billboard), and the early 1990s phenomenon of boutique-type stores selling nothing but condoms in various colours and shapes. The result is, like much of his work, a vivid snapshot of American life, but I do wonder how well readers in other countries and in other languages get it.
The revelation of Shay’s crime towards the end of the novel is ultimately dropped in a casual manner and it is nowhere near as shocking as one might expect. Many readers will find it anti-climactic, but in my opinion, what DeLillo is exploring here is how time tends to heal a lot of the damage we do to our own reputations, and events that are scandalous and hang like a vast shadow over our youths ultimately have little impact on the family and professional lives we live many decades on.
The heart of Underworld’s plot is the life of Nick Shay, told in a reverse chronology from the 1990s when he is in his late fifties and a successful executive in an Arizona waste-management company, to the 1950s when he is a teenager in the Bronx. Readers soon learn that Nick spent some time in prison as a young man, and thus we are essentially working back to the revelation of the crime that he committed.
As the novel proceeds, it jumps back several years at a time, and ultimately DeLillo aims to paint a grand canvas of American life across that half century. Thus, the prologue of the novel retells the famous Dodgers–Yankees baseball game of October 5, 1951 (“the shot heard around the world”), which just happened to be the same day that the USSR announced its second atomic bomb test. There is a scene in the 1960s where J. Edgar Hoover clashes with hippies. DeLillo shows us both a 1980s Bronx, heavily African-American and Latino and hit hard by the crack epidemic, and a Bronx from decades earlier that was still dominated by Italian and Jewish families. A side character spends years traveling the USA in search of a piece of baseball memorabilia, and characters grow old and die (or rather, are show standing at death’s door before later being reintroduced to the reader in their prime of youth.) These vignettes take us far from the Shay story, and though some of the side characters have a connection to Shay, it is often tenuous.
As I made my way through Underworld, I was reminded of Philip J. Roth’s claim, “To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really.” This is especially applicable to DeLillo’s big book, because if one reads too slowly, one is likely to lose track of some of the thematic connections and intricate relationships between characters that DeLillo constructs. Yet ultimately some of the side plots did not feel fully fleshed out to me, and Underworld really could have been trimmed to a shorter, more manageable novel without any loss of its powerful aspects.
Those familiar with DeLillo’s style from his immediately preceding novels will find that his interest in late-twentieth-century American consumerism, sensationalist media, and information overload is continued here, though not quite to White Noise levels. An especial interest of DeLillo’s is the rubbish that American families procedure – its volume increasing along with consumerism – and how an entire industry exists to deal with that which we have used up and is of no further use to us. Through Shay’s role as a waste-management company executive, readers are shown landfills and nuclear waste disposal sites, forms of burial that give the novel’s title one of its multiple meanings. DeLillo also riffs on the phenomenon by which tabloid news claims that the Virgin Mary appears on a piece of toast or whatever (in this case, a slain ghetto child’s face is seen in a highway billboard), and the early 1990s phenomenon of boutique-type stores selling nothing but condoms in various colours and shapes. The result is, like much of his work, a vivid snapshot of American life, but I do wonder how well readers in other countries and in other languages get it.
The revelation of Shay’s crime towards the end of the novel is ultimately dropped in a casual manner and it is nowhere near as shocking as one might expect. Many readers will find it anti-climactic, but in my opinion, what DeLillo is exploring here is how time tends to heal a lot of the damage we do to our own reputations, and events that are scandalous and hang like a vast shadow over our youths ultimately have little impact on the family and professional lives we live many decades on.
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Last week I listened to the audio Version of Underworld by Don DeLillo. It's one of those books that I felt I should read because it won the Pulitzer and because it's cited as one of the great works of modern American literature. I felt that I would learn a lot from the writing style and from the atmosphere of a book about Cold War America.
But maybe I'm dumb. I mean there are flashes of absolute brilliance in this book that got through even my thick skull. I'm not saying that there aren't. But what has me frustrated is that no matter what I did the book couldn't hold my interest. Maybe I'm just too dumb to understand are the levels of complexity that DeLillo brings to the page. This is my second novel by him, the first being Falling Man. It was also a book that I didn't really like.
I think it's that he dissects scenes in excruciating detail in something that he calls super omniscience. Well that doesn't really work for me. To take a single panoramic view of the room or a stadium or a garbage dump and give it 100 pages to break it down into its minute components is less art than it is just plain boring.
I get the the work that he does with themes, and it's good. There's a baseball, and that baseball symbolizes purity and innocence throughout the novel and that's good. Garbage shows up in every scene in one way or another and it brings about the complex feelings that the reader is supposed to have about the about the Cold War and about our nation; about the helplessness that one has over the garbage of our lives, over the garbage of our minds. I get that and it's done well. There are a lot of things that I liked about this novel. But what I didn't like is that it grinds to a standstill so that the author can dazzle us with the insight that his intellectual mind holds for everyday things.
I don't think I'll be reading anymore of Delillo's work. There's just too much intelligence is also interesting for me to spend time on intelligence that's pedantic.
But maybe I'm dumb. I mean there are flashes of absolute brilliance in this book that got through even my thick skull. I'm not saying that there aren't. But what has me frustrated is that no matter what I did the book couldn't hold my interest. Maybe I'm just too dumb to understand are the levels of complexity that DeLillo brings to the page. This is my second novel by him, the first being Falling Man. It was also a book that I didn't really like.
I think it's that he dissects scenes in excruciating detail in something that he calls super omniscience. Well that doesn't really work for me. To take a single panoramic view of the room or a stadium or a garbage dump and give it 100 pages to break it down into its minute components is less art than it is just plain boring.
I get the the work that he does with themes, and it's good. There's a baseball, and that baseball symbolizes purity and innocence throughout the novel and that's good. Garbage shows up in every scene in one way or another and it brings about the complex feelings that the reader is supposed to have about the about the Cold War and about our nation; about the helplessness that one has over the garbage of our lives, over the garbage of our minds. I get that and it's done well. There are a lot of things that I liked about this novel. But what I didn't like is that it grinds to a standstill so that the author can dazzle us with the insight that his intellectual mind holds for everyday things.
I don't think I'll be reading anymore of Delillo's work. There's just too much intelligence is also interesting for me to spend time on intelligence that's pedantic.
I think this is my new favorite DeLillo. I’m definitely late to the party, but I don’t know of any authors that transport me in quite the way that he does, and Underworld is the best example of his power so far.
challenging
reflective
relaxing
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes