tittypete 's review for:

Underworld by Don DeLillo

2.0

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This books starts off with a baseball game in the 50s. The Giants v Dodgers when they were both in NY. A guy hits a home run into the stands and the Giants win. This is a big deal to people in NY at the time. And the home run ball is stolen from a fan by a little black kid. Also on this same day the Russians detonate a nuke. So symbolism and stuff. The book sort of follows the ball as it’s stolen by the black kid’s dad and sold to another kid’s dad. There’s a bunch of separate timelines and narratives going and they sort of follow this guy who later in life owns the ball. The nuclear bomb and subsequent cold war escalation weave their ways in. There’s old times fifties scenes of Italians in the Bronx back when that was a thing. And sex affairs. The best part was the 2 pages where a memorabilia collector has super stinky shits in Eastern Europe. Otherwise the book is sort of a wish mash of superbly written dialog scenes that sort of over lap. Turns out the important baseball’s final owner shot his buddy in the face with a sawed off shotgun on accident and a nun goes on the internet and the reader is left with a rumination on the word peace. It’s 800 pages.

So far Delillo is 2 for 4 with me. I liked White Noise and Libra. The Names sucked. And this one reminded me of White Noise in its character studies but wasn’t as funny and was three times as long.

The end.

Love, Mitch.