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3.88 AVERAGE
3.88 AVERAGE
This is my second DeLillo and I'm noticing a pattern in how I feel about his novels: the ideas are fantastic, but the main characters are wooden, badly drawn, and above all boring. As far as motifs, themes, ideas, structure, images, supporting figures, and some scenes (that don't involve the leads): the novel is an amazing achievement. However, there is no emotional connection to these characters and they are horribly written. It's frustrating because I wanted to like this book more than I did.
4.5 stars
This is a great American novel. It spans from the early 1950s to late 90's, with deeply drawn characters. Subjects and themes include war, sex, death, childhood, the path of a historic baseball, birth, trash, murder, religion, chess, education, fame, wealth, power, art, secrets, and betrayal. Characters are from families we might find in any common neighborhood to major cultural players like Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, Lenny Bruce, JFK, and Jayne Mansfield.
Underworld asks a lot from the reader but every hour you spend with the book is a gift.
This is a great American novel. It spans from the early 1950s to late 90's, with deeply drawn characters. Subjects and themes include war, sex, death, childhood, the path of a historic baseball, birth, trash, murder, religion, chess, education, fame, wealth, power, art, secrets, and betrayal. Characters are from families we might find in any common neighborhood to major cultural players like Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, Lenny Bruce, JFK, and Jayne Mansfield.
Underworld asks a lot from the reader but every hour you spend with the book is a gift.
Do not read if stories of dogs being abandoned on highways bother you. It is really good to listen to before bed because it is exhaustingly dull with repetitive dialogue.
Hmm. I expected to loathe this, which I didn't; I found it surprisingly readable for a 800 page old white guy novel. Was it GOOD? I'm not sure. It was rambly, disjointed, and at times felt faux-deep like so many old white guy novels do. Yet I still found myself engaged and curious about the characters, their histories, their choices, what their futures could be--- and then every once in a while there would be a sentence so beautiful and so obscurely emotionally right it would take my breath away. Plus the misogyny was much less severe than reading Roth, for example, and was even sometimes noticed and interrogated. I don't think I'd recommend this, but I'm not mad I read it.
The kind of novel that elevates what you thought was possible with writing. Unbelievably skillful and beautifully written. Masterpiece.
I rated this book five stars because I genuinely think it deserves it. It is one of the best examples of postmodern American literature ever written.
That being said, Underworld does suffer from being very long. Having researched the book and learned about Don DeLillo, I don't think the book's length is because of portentousness. I really just think DeLillo felt like this was the length of the story he was telling. However, the book is a heavy task for the reader. It has the same pace at page 200 as 700.
Reading Underworld felt highly reminiscent of James Joyce and the longer works of Faulkner, like Absalom! Absalom!. In fact, reading Underworld felt a lot like reading Dubliners: a decentralized collection of interconnected stories that help paint a unified picture. In Dubliners it was, of course, Dublin. In Underworld, the portrait is of Cold War America, ranging from the 1950s to the 1990s. I do not think any other book has captured this subject matter better than Underworld. Approaching this book as a collection of stories instead of a single narrative will help make the story easier to digest. Like Joyce, DeLillo also changes writing style depending on the chapter, usually reflecting the era or context he's writing about. The scenes of Arizona and California in the 80's and 90's feel like the surrealism of Thomas Pynchon, the 70's scenes of New York feel a bit like Tom Wolfe's energized prose, and the scenes of 50's the Bronx have an earthy, grounded, nostalgic feel.
Even though the reader will probably be exhausted at the end, I also felt like the ending was brilliant and that DeLillo absolutely nailed it. Reading this book in 2023, his observations about the internet felt absolutely prescient.
In the wake of Infinite Jest, I'm glad that writing books this long and convoluted has become unfashionable. That being said, I really enjoyed this book and think it marks the end of an era, both literally and in a literary sense. DeLillo handles it extremely well, and his reflective and emotionally deep retrospective make the book a rewarding read.
That being said, Underworld does suffer from being very long. Having researched the book and learned about Don DeLillo, I don't think the book's length is because of portentousness. I really just think DeLillo felt like this was the length of the story he was telling. However, the book is a heavy task for the reader. It has the same pace at page 200 as 700.
Reading Underworld felt highly reminiscent of James Joyce and the longer works of Faulkner, like Absalom! Absalom!. In fact, reading Underworld felt a lot like reading Dubliners: a decentralized collection of interconnected stories that help paint a unified picture. In Dubliners it was, of course, Dublin. In Underworld, the portrait is of Cold War America, ranging from the 1950s to the 1990s. I do not think any other book has captured this subject matter better than Underworld. Approaching this book as a collection of stories instead of a single narrative will help make the story easier to digest. Like Joyce, DeLillo also changes writing style depending on the chapter, usually reflecting the era or context he's writing about. The scenes of Arizona and California in the 80's and 90's feel like the surrealism of Thomas Pynchon, the 70's scenes of New York feel a bit like Tom Wolfe's energized prose, and the scenes of 50's the Bronx have an earthy, grounded, nostalgic feel.
Even though the reader will probably be exhausted at the end, I also felt like the ending was brilliant and that DeLillo absolutely nailed it. Reading this book in 2023, his observations about the internet felt absolutely prescient.
In the wake of Infinite Jest, I'm glad that writing books this long and convoluted has become unfashionable. That being said, I really enjoyed this book and think it marks the end of an era, both literally and in a literary sense. DeLillo handles it extremely well, and his reflective and emotionally deep retrospective make the book a rewarding read.
Might be the longest book I ever finished and enjoyed throughout! That's already a reason to love it! What would I do without my fave, Don DeLillo, or as I like to call him, the Whore of PoMo.
Disclaimer: It is entirely possible I did not understand this book at all and what follows is meaningless babble.
Of all the books I have ever read I believe Underworld might be the hardest to review. Not because of the star rating. That is a 5 without question. The writing here is dazzling. This is historical fiction deconstructed, reconstructed, and then thrown into a supercharged industrial blender and shot out into the cosmos. Our “hero” works in “waste management” and a recuring theme here is the creative ways we prettify the fact of our waste products, from actual shit to plutonium waste, helping us to ignore the fact that all this waste, submerged or made into building materials or buried, or whatever, is destroying the planet. The parallel between the way in which DeLillo treats historical fiction (and the way he treats history for that matter) and the waste management sleight of hand is a terrifying yet fun way to render evil genius. He turns the metaphors used by marketers to make the most pernicious toxic things seem like gifts to the world into a metaphor for humans creating a glossy version of the past and future they can live with. He uses a central metaphor as a second central metaphor. It is breathtaking.
DeLillo seems to repudiate nostalgia here (a concept I wholeheartedly embrace.) The past is special because we want it to be special. We create false memories and expunge anything problematic. The value of memory is no more than mass delusion. “Every memory we have is, finally, of ourselves. If the memory of an experience is flawed, there is a rift in the continuity of self.” We are fiddling with the past, creating a good-ol-days myth in order to get a hit of dopamine and forget we are inexorably moving toward an end we ourselves have ordained. The past is filled with as much or more evil than the present but people agree to apply and validate the nostalgia filter because mass delusion gives us succor and hope in a harsh and hopeless world. That nostalgia filter is no different from the delusions of people who see statues of the Virgin Mary weep or the face of Jesus in a water stain on a building, just a delusion born of privilege rather than want.
Despite Underworld's brilliance as a whole, and maybe because there is no plot (as there is no plot in life) sometimes the whole thing seems to kind of fall apart. There are lulls – long lulls that left me pretty disconnected to the rest of the story. But, though it wanders off frequently, the book comes charging back every time to this concept of life and memory as a euphemism, like Glenn Close popping up spring loaded in Michael Douglas’ tub. When I was poking around trying to pump myself up to read this book, I came across a quote from Martin Amis’ review of this book that really sums things up: “Underworld may or may not be a great novel, but there is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great novelist.” Those lulls are problematic, but they are the packaging for utter brilliance.
Lenny Bruce comes up a lot in this book. He is not simply mentioned. DeLillo recreates several Bruce performances while tunneling into Bruce’s brilliant, tragic, overfilled head. While this is well done I started wondering a bit past the halfway point why Don kept doing this and why he kept focusing on the way Bruce ping-ponged between funny traditionally structured bawdy insightful jokes and profound, decidedly unfunny, observations about human cruelty and idiocy and brilliance, and the inevitability that those things will drive us to destroy ourselves (Bruce’s tagline, “we’re all gonna diiiiiiiiiiiiie,” is the chorus here.) At first it was easy to connect Bruce’s routines to the specter of nuclear annihilation. After wondering about that for a while I realized that DeLillo had coopted Bruce’s structure for this book. He intersperses incredibly funny and traditionally structured scenes with profound, decidedly unfunny observations about human cruelty and idiocy, and brilliance, and the inevitability that those things will drive us to destroy ourselves. I think DeLillo uses some of the lulls the same way as the humor. All of it wraps up profound truth, Delillo is a modern day Lenny who understands you can't keep an audience with a spare recitation of terrifying truth.
A couple random notes on things that really impressed me. First, while parts of this book are firmly rooted in the language and thought processes of the 60’s. 70’s and 80’s DeLillo was disturbingly prescient, and much of this feels very current. He saw the danger of things that have now come to roost but which when this was written most just saw as progress. Second, the book launches with what could easily have been published as a free-standing novella set at one of the most famous baseball game moments ever (Bobby Thomson’s walk-off homerun in the 1951 National League Dodgers- Giants pennant game a/k/a “the shot heard round the world.”) This opening novella stands as one of the finest pieces of writing I have ever read. Even if you decide not to invest in this giant book, 827 pages that require complete mental focus pretty much all the time, you should read the first part. You should bear in mind though that the epilogue is a response of sorts to that opening bit of nostalgia. The ending also, it gives us some closure on the baseball which is hit in the opening and sails through these pages. Never has a baseball worked this hard, but though dinged up it manages to knit the book together.
I will shut up now and hope at least a couple of people will be inspired to take on this boulder of a book.
*This book weighs about 10 pounds. It is not totable so I got the audio to listen to on the subway, and I read the hardcover at home. The audio was enjoyable so I don't not recommend it, but this is a book you want to read in print. When I listened on the train and got home and picked up the book it felt like I had never seen/heard the portions I listened too. I couldn't figure out where I was. Nearly every time I listened I ended up going back and reading the text.
Of all the books I have ever read I believe Underworld might be the hardest to review. Not because of the star rating. That is a 5 without question. The writing here is dazzling. This is historical fiction deconstructed, reconstructed, and then thrown into a supercharged industrial blender and shot out into the cosmos. Our “hero” works in “waste management” and a recuring theme here is the creative ways we prettify the fact of our waste products, from actual shit to plutonium waste, helping us to ignore the fact that all this waste, submerged or made into building materials or buried, or whatever, is destroying the planet. The parallel between the way in which DeLillo treats historical fiction (and the way he treats history for that matter) and the waste management sleight of hand is a terrifying yet fun way to render evil genius. He turns the metaphors used by marketers to make the most pernicious toxic things seem like gifts to the world into a metaphor for humans creating a glossy version of the past and future they can live with. He uses a central metaphor as a second central metaphor. It is breathtaking.
DeLillo seems to repudiate nostalgia here (a concept I wholeheartedly embrace.) The past is special because we want it to be special. We create false memories and expunge anything problematic. The value of memory is no more than mass delusion. “Every memory we have is, finally, of ourselves. If the memory of an experience is flawed, there is a rift in the continuity of self.” We are fiddling with the past, creating a good-ol-days myth in order to get a hit of dopamine and forget we are inexorably moving toward an end we ourselves have ordained. The past is filled with as much or more evil than the present but people agree to apply and validate the nostalgia filter because mass delusion gives us succor and hope in a harsh and hopeless world. That nostalgia filter is no different from the delusions of people who see statues of the Virgin Mary weep or the face of Jesus in a water stain on a building, just a delusion born of privilege rather than want.
Despite Underworld's brilliance as a whole, and maybe because there is no plot (as there is no plot in life) sometimes the whole thing seems to kind of fall apart. There are lulls – long lulls that left me pretty disconnected to the rest of the story. But, though it wanders off frequently, the book comes charging back every time to this concept of life and memory as a euphemism, like Glenn Close popping up spring loaded in Michael Douglas’ tub. When I was poking around trying to pump myself up to read this book, I came across a quote from Martin Amis’ review of this book that really sums things up: “Underworld may or may not be a great novel, but there is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great novelist.” Those lulls are problematic, but they are the packaging for utter brilliance.
Lenny Bruce comes up a lot in this book. He is not simply mentioned. DeLillo recreates several Bruce performances while tunneling into Bruce’s brilliant, tragic, overfilled head. While this is well done I started wondering a bit past the halfway point why Don kept doing this and why he kept focusing on the way Bruce ping-ponged between funny traditionally structured bawdy insightful jokes and profound, decidedly unfunny, observations about human cruelty and idiocy and brilliance, and the inevitability that those things will drive us to destroy ourselves (Bruce’s tagline, “we’re all gonna diiiiiiiiiiiiie,” is the chorus here.) At first it was easy to connect Bruce’s routines to the specter of nuclear annihilation. After wondering about that for a while I realized that DeLillo had coopted Bruce’s structure for this book. He intersperses incredibly funny and traditionally structured scenes with profound, decidedly unfunny observations about human cruelty and idiocy, and brilliance, and the inevitability that those things will drive us to destroy ourselves. I think DeLillo uses some of the lulls the same way as the humor. All of it wraps up profound truth, Delillo is a modern day Lenny who understands you can't keep an audience with a spare recitation of terrifying truth.
A couple random notes on things that really impressed me. First, while parts of this book are firmly rooted in the language and thought processes of the 60’s. 70’s and 80’s DeLillo was disturbingly prescient, and much of this feels very current. He saw the danger of things that have now come to roost but which when this was written most just saw as progress. Second, the book launches with what could easily have been published as a free-standing novella set at one of the most famous baseball game moments ever (Bobby Thomson’s walk-off homerun in the 1951 National League Dodgers- Giants pennant game a/k/a “the shot heard round the world.”) This opening novella stands as one of the finest pieces of writing I have ever read. Even if you decide not to invest in this giant book, 827 pages that require complete mental focus pretty much all the time, you should read the first part. You should bear in mind though that the epilogue is a response of sorts to that opening bit of nostalgia. The ending also, it gives us some closure on the baseball which is hit in the opening and sails through these pages. Never has a baseball worked this hard, but though dinged up it manages to knit the book together.
I will shut up now and hope at least a couple of people will be inspired to take on this boulder of a book.
*This book weighs about 10 pounds. It is not totable so I got the audio to listen to on the subway, and I read the hardcover at home. The audio was enjoyable so I don't not recommend it, but this is a book you want to read in print. When I listened on the train and got home and picked up the book it felt like I had never seen/heard the portions I listened too. I couldn't figure out where I was. Nearly every time I listened I ended up going back and reading the text.
Baseball is another word for the bomb; downwinders run along the edges of the Bronx.
Don DeLillo writes perfect sentences at a high clip—page after page of that little thing you have always done but never said out loud; words combined in familiar ways to force open an awareness to un acknowledged details of life. Basic parts of life hum with radiant, thoughtful beauty.
This book is 827 of plotless writing, or sometimes there’s a plot but it’s never exactly the point, the point is the spirit and the people. 827, 8 minus 2 plus 7 equals 13, check the math.
Every time I write, I write like Don DeLillo, but I can’t find the perfect words, and I guess that’s just something I need to work on in myself. (At the same time, I want to do it.)
Right now I’m working on copying out the prologue verbatim, that Hunter S Thompson strategy to just get a handle on the rhythm and the flow, and I’m mystified at the propulsion of this man’s prose, DeLillo I mean. The neologisms and onomatopoeias alone, before everything else.
Every day I walk around and see the same things, feel the same ways—my relationships acquire new countenances and my car needs new repairs—but while reading Don DeLillo’s Underworld (like White Noise) these familiar themes are radically different, they are not just background radiation but signs and wonders, messages from history and fellow men shot through the time and space to drip down my back in the form of sweat. It makes me feel active and alert and alive; the way I used to feel when I was constantly surfacing from beneath waves I didn’t know were holding me down, a feeling I don’t really get anymore.
This book could have been 2500 pages and I wouldn’t have batted an eye
Don DeLillo writes perfect sentences at a high clip—page after page of that little thing you have always done but never said out loud; words combined in familiar ways to force open an awareness to un acknowledged details of life. Basic parts of life hum with radiant, thoughtful beauty.
This book is 827 of plotless writing, or sometimes there’s a plot but it’s never exactly the point, the point is the spirit and the people. 827, 8 minus 2 plus 7 equals 13, check the math.
Every time I write, I write like Don DeLillo, but I can’t find the perfect words, and I guess that’s just something I need to work on in myself. (At the same time, I want to do it.)
Right now I’m working on copying out the prologue verbatim, that Hunter S Thompson strategy to just get a handle on the rhythm and the flow, and I’m mystified at the propulsion of this man’s prose, DeLillo I mean. The neologisms and onomatopoeias alone, before everything else.
Every day I walk around and see the same things, feel the same ways—my relationships acquire new countenances and my car needs new repairs—but while reading Don DeLillo’s Underworld (like White Noise) these familiar themes are radically different, they are not just background radiation but signs and wonders, messages from history and fellow men shot through the time and space to drip down my back in the form of sweat. It makes me feel active and alert and alive; the way I used to feel when I was constantly surfacing from beneath waves I didn’t know were holding me down, a feeling I don’t really get anymore.
This book could have been 2500 pages and I wouldn’t have batted an eye