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3.88 AVERAGE
3.88 AVERAGE
"There is something somber about the things we've collected and own, the household effects, there is something about the word itself, effects, the lacquered chest in the alcove, that breathes a kind of sadness - the wall hangings and artifacts and valuables - and I feel a loneliness, a loss, all the greater and stranger when the object is relatively rare and it's the hour after sunset in a stillness that feels unceasing."
Joyce Carol Oates said DeLillo has "frightening perception" and the way you read his passages about trash heaps, memorabilia, nuclear waste, condoms, certainly paints a terrifying emotional landscape of America. Not one to be despised or pitied, but one that longs to be cared for, for reconciliation. Makes me want to go to a Cubs game and smoke a Lucky Strike
Joyce Carol Oates said DeLillo has "frightening perception" and the way you read his passages about trash heaps, memorabilia, nuclear waste, condoms, certainly paints a terrifying emotional landscape of America. Not one to be despised or pitied, but one that longs to be cared for, for reconciliation. Makes me want to go to a Cubs game and smoke a Lucky Strike
challenging
funny
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
It’s a book about a diverse set of boomers suffering nihilistic crises when they hit middle age in the early 1990s. I’ve read several late 80s early 90s literary novels recently, all authored by gen-boomers,and in a way it’s led me to understand their mindset a bit more. They share a grave sense of childhood betrayal vis-a-vis the American Dream. It’s a defining characteristic, idealizing an impossibly perfect Americana in their early years that is suddenly shattered by the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s. Ironically, they revel in their participation in the 1960s chaos while simultaneously lamenting the loss of the American pastoral they were pointedly seeking to destroy as young adults. It’s a really schizophrenic worldview, and they’re really unhappy with its whiplashing implications (those boomers self-reflective enough to understand the paradox at least). For a gen-X reader like me, this is all a bit anticlimactic. Delillo alights on all the right topics here for the next wave of American disappointment (gun violence, terrorism, consumerism, neoconservatism), but his boomerish penchant for staying stuck in the 50s and 60s prevents him from foreseeing the magnitudinous changes coming in the next few years. His cynicism here seems quaint knowing that Columbine, 9-11, Iraq, and the great recession were just around the corner. So unlike his touching exploration of nihilism at the very personal, familial level in White Noise, this grand-narrative attempt at crafting a “great American novel” is overshadowed by the actual American history that followed shortly after.
The writing is excellent, as is usually the case with DeLillo. The huge devotion of plot to sports did not resonate with me as a reader and felt overly drawn out.
This needs some explaining. After rating many hundreds of read books, this one had me the most perplexed as to how to rate it. I was thinking, either a 3 or a 5. A three>, or a five?! It was suggested I average it out as a 4, but that seemed to me to just misrepresent both ratings.
There is no question for me that the writing in this book is 5 star, all the way. Though the lengthy baseball stadium scene at the beginning, packed with American cliches and the slapstick team of Hoover and Gleason, started me off decisively thinking I was not at all going to like this book, it won me over with its amazing presentation and acute powers of observation. To my amazement I found myself eventually able to see the baseball game (and fans) from a whole other perspective than I thought possible. This is 5 star stuff. And it just keeps going, and going, and going...
And yet, honestly, the book is extremely American, and as much as I'm dazzled by the writing and observations, the characters and content just don't speak to me personally very much. Hence, for me, though the writing is top notch, I can't get much beyond "liked it" (3 stars).
So, seeking enlightenment, I naturally read a bunch of reviews here to get a sense of how others have evaluated this work. There's very little middle ground. There's a blanket of 4 and 5 stars, peppered with shotgun blasts of of 1 star holes.
The 1 star hits are, without a doubt, the more substantial (sadly) and fun to read. I guess the 5 star reviewers are just too in awe and humbled to attempt to write anything insightful after completing the masterpiece? What more is there to say?
I am in entire sympathy with most of the 1 star reviews I read. Yes, the book really feels long. Yes, what "plot" there is, there hardly is. Yes, Delillo is brutally long winded. Yes, it can't help but drag on probably even the most ardent fan in places. Yes, it's really hard to hang on to the thread, and not drift off into the aether of words.
I am in sympathy with those who "did not like", for these reasons. They are justified in this perspective. And yet I am also sad. They seem to have missed so much. I feel, when confronted with such a sweeping, complexly structured, and yet minutely detailed work as this, that the lack is in us the readers rather than in the text. This is a work we really do need to expand ourselves and apply ourselves to connect with, as lovers of literature, lovers of observation, and lovers of life.
And so, slightly ironically, it was the delightful and painful one star reviews that pushed me from the middle of the road into the extremely starry expanse. This book deserves the stars, even if I don't entirely feel them.
I still like White Noise more (the only other Delillo I've thus far read) -- though it has less stars from me.
I hope this explanation of my here aberrant rating is satisfactory (to me).
There is no question for me that the writing in this book is 5 star, all the way. Though the lengthy baseball stadium scene at the beginning, packed with American cliches and the slapstick team of Hoover and Gleason, started me off decisively thinking I was not at all going to like this book, it won me over with its amazing presentation and acute powers of observation. To my amazement I found myself eventually able to see the baseball game (and fans) from a whole other perspective than I thought possible. This is 5 star stuff. And it just keeps going, and going, and going...
And yet, honestly, the book is extremely American, and as much as I'm dazzled by the writing and observations, the characters and content just don't speak to me personally very much. Hence, for me, though the writing is top notch, I can't get much beyond "liked it" (3 stars).
So, seeking enlightenment, I naturally read a bunch of reviews here to get a sense of how others have evaluated this work. There's very little middle ground. There's a blanket of 4 and 5 stars, peppered with shotgun blasts of of 1 star holes.
The 1 star hits are, without a doubt, the more substantial (sadly) and fun to read. I guess the 5 star reviewers are just too in awe and humbled to attempt to write anything insightful after completing the masterpiece? What more is there to say?
I am in entire sympathy with most of the 1 star reviews I read. Yes, the book really feels long. Yes, what "plot" there is, there hardly is. Yes, Delillo is brutally long winded. Yes, it can't help but drag on probably even the most ardent fan in places. Yes, it's really hard to hang on to the thread, and not drift off into the aether of words.
I am in sympathy with those who "did not like", for these reasons. They are justified in this perspective. And yet I am also sad. They seem to have missed so much. I feel, when confronted with such a sweeping, complexly structured, and yet minutely detailed work as this, that the lack is in us the readers rather than in the text. This is a work we really do need to expand ourselves and apply ourselves to connect with, as lovers of literature, lovers of observation, and lovers of life.
And so, slightly ironically, it was the delightful and painful one star reviews that pushed me from the middle of the road into the extremely starry expanse. This book deserves the stars, even if I don't entirely feel them.
I still like White Noise more (the only other Delillo I've thus far read) -- though it has less stars from me.
I hope this explanation of my here aberrant rating is satisfactory (to me).
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
oh my god soooo long have to start over it's been like two years omg
When I was reading “Underworld” by Don DeLillo (1997), someone asked me what it was about. I said, “it’s about a baseball.” I got a wordless response somewhere between confusion and incredulity – the book is 827 pages long. It’s about the baseball thrown by Ralph Branca and hit into the left field stands by Bobby Thompson at the Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951 to give the New York Giants the pennant that year over the Brooklyn Dodgers. Myself, I was in Pittsburgh at the time and wouldn’t turn 1 year old until a couple of weeks after that game, but years later I am a Los Angeles Dodgers fan who remembers (and has kept the ticket stub from) a game at Chavez Ravine on May 11, 1963 when Sandy Koufax pitched a no-hitter against the San Francisco Giants. For many of us baseball is a nostalgic conduit to childhood. Maybe I should have said the book is about a young fictional Dodger fan named Nick Shay who grew up as an Italian Catholic kid in Brooklyn at the time (much like DeLillo himself). Actually, it’s pretty much about the entire last half the 20th century – specifically the effect of the Cold War on the American psyche. In fact, the October 5, 1997 NY Times review of the book by Martin Amis was subtitled, “How America learned to stop worrying and love the bomb” after Dr. Strangelove, the famous Kubrick film noir from 1964. In his September 16, 1997 NY times review, Michiko Kakutani says the book is about “both the hard, bright world of public events and the more subterranean world of private emotions in which individuals are connected by a secret calculus of hope and loss. It is the story of one man, one family, but it is also the story of what happened to America in the second half of the 20th century.” That’s a better description.
The novel is about the contemporaneous chaos of life and the interconnectedness of events, personal and political. Nick Shay’s father Jimmy Costanza walked out one night for a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes and never came back. As Nick tries to make sense of this central event in his life, we get a major history lesson including America’s atomic bomb testing in New Mexico, the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War. It’s a challenging book to read in the way it jumps around in time, from character to character, and from story line to story line without warning, sometimes in the middle of a page. You have to be paying attention. The baseball travels through history too. It’s initially retrieved by Cotter Martin, a kid who plays hooky from school to “crash the gate” and attend the famous game on October 3, 1951. His father Manx sells the ball for $32.45 to advertising executive Charles Wainwright for all the money in his pocket while Wainwright is waiting in line with his young son Chuckie Jr to get tickets to the World Series. Years later, Nick buys the ball for 1000 times that amount from the compulsive baseball memorabilia hound, Marvin Lundy. The ball serves as a touchstone for Nick, bringing him back to his childhood in Brooklyn. It brings him back to that lost game and the loss of his father. We also have the story of Nick’s brother Matty who was a chess prodigy tutored by high school teacher Albert Bronzini, married at the time to Klara Sax with whom Nick has a brief steamy sexual affair when he is just 17. The second section of the book finds Nick visiting with the aging artist Klara as she is in the southwest preparing to paint a fleet of aging B52 bombers for an art project (one of the bombers with the moniker “Long Tall Sally” is the same one Chuckie Wainwright Jr served as navigator on during the Vietnam War). All of the characters in the book are unsettled and often jumpy. Klara hears the snapping of the Cinzano awnings at outdoor cafes in NY city and thinks at first she is hearing gunshots and Matty Shay and his girlfriend Janet Urbaniak jump at the sonic boom of jets flying over as they drive through the New Mexico desert thinking they are experiencing another nuclear test. The disturbed Texas highway shooter Richard Henry Gilkey haunts the book randomly shooting out his driver side window and killing drivers, the death of one of whom is caught on a child’s video camera – an unresolved story line reminiscent of the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, which itself also makes a cameo appearance. Talking about “Underworld” William Boyd writing in The Guardian (UK) in 1998 says, “this is what the novel can do, and indeed does, better than any other art form it gets the human condition, it skewers and fixes it in all its richness and squalor unlike anything else.” We have to wait the entire book to find out the circumstances of Nick’s shooting and killing of George (the waiter) Manza when Nick is just 17. Another theme of the story is the “underworld” that is the garbage-laden seamy underside of what seems to be the perfect 50’s world on the surface. The “Eisenhower-shiny world” to quote Susan Werner (“Last of the Good Straight Girls”).
Thompson’s homer was the “shot heard around the world,” and on the same day Russia announced it had tested (for the second time) a nuclear bomb. On the same day, Julius Rosenberg was sitting in a jail cell in Ossining NY bemoaning the Dodger loss. In March, 1951 he’d been convicted of passing US secrets about development of atomic weapons to the Russians. We find out much later in 2006 when Joshua Prager publishes “The Echoing Green” that Thompson knew that Branca’s pitch would be a fastball because the Giants were picking off the catcher’s signals using a small telescope and transmitting the signals to their dugout by wire. The story is populated too by several historical figures, notably J Edgar Hoover and Lenny Bruce.
The novel is about the contemporaneous chaos of life and the interconnectedness of events, personal and political. Nick Shay’s father Jimmy Costanza walked out one night for a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes and never came back. As Nick tries to make sense of this central event in his life, we get a major history lesson including America’s atomic bomb testing in New Mexico, the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War. It’s a challenging book to read in the way it jumps around in time, from character to character, and from story line to story line without warning, sometimes in the middle of a page. You have to be paying attention. The baseball travels through history too. It’s initially retrieved by Cotter Martin, a kid who plays hooky from school to “crash the gate” and attend the famous game on October 3, 1951. His father Manx sells the ball for $32.45 to advertising executive Charles Wainwright for all the money in his pocket while Wainwright is waiting in line with his young son Chuckie Jr to get tickets to the World Series. Years later, Nick buys the ball for 1000 times that amount from the compulsive baseball memorabilia hound, Marvin Lundy. The ball serves as a touchstone for Nick, bringing him back to his childhood in Brooklyn. It brings him back to that lost game and the loss of his father. We also have the story of Nick’s brother Matty who was a chess prodigy tutored by high school teacher Albert Bronzini, married at the time to Klara Sax with whom Nick has a brief steamy sexual affair when he is just 17. The second section of the book finds Nick visiting with the aging artist Klara as she is in the southwest preparing to paint a fleet of aging B52 bombers for an art project (one of the bombers with the moniker “Long Tall Sally” is the same one Chuckie Wainwright Jr served as navigator on during the Vietnam War). All of the characters in the book are unsettled and often jumpy. Klara hears the snapping of the Cinzano awnings at outdoor cafes in NY city and thinks at first she is hearing gunshots and Matty Shay and his girlfriend Janet Urbaniak jump at the sonic boom of jets flying over as they drive through the New Mexico desert thinking they are experiencing another nuclear test. The disturbed Texas highway shooter Richard Henry Gilkey haunts the book randomly shooting out his driver side window and killing drivers, the death of one of whom is caught on a child’s video camera – an unresolved story line reminiscent of the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, which itself also makes a cameo appearance. Talking about “Underworld” William Boyd writing in The Guardian (UK) in 1998 says, “this is what the novel can do, and indeed does, better than any other art form it gets the human condition, it skewers and fixes it in all its richness and squalor unlike anything else.” We have to wait the entire book to find out the circumstances of Nick’s shooting and killing of George (the waiter) Manza when Nick is just 17. Another theme of the story is the “underworld” that is the garbage-laden seamy underside of what seems to be the perfect 50’s world on the surface. The “Eisenhower-shiny world” to quote Susan Werner (“Last of the Good Straight Girls”).
Thompson’s homer was the “shot heard around the world,” and on the same day Russia announced it had tested (for the second time) a nuclear bomb. On the same day, Julius Rosenberg was sitting in a jail cell in Ossining NY bemoaning the Dodger loss. In March, 1951 he’d been convicted of passing US secrets about development of atomic weapons to the Russians. We find out much later in 2006 when Joshua Prager publishes “The Echoing Green” that Thompson knew that Branca’s pitch would be a fastball because the Giants were picking off the catcher’s signals using a small telescope and transmitting the signals to their dugout by wire. The story is populated too by several historical figures, notably J Edgar Hoover and Lenny Bruce.
challenging
emotional
reflective
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:
Yes
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
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:
Complicated
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
reflective
slow-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