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msub 's review for:
Underworld
by Don DeLillo
I first started this book just before I arrived on campus for my freshman year of college. I had probably read 50-60 pages before I got to campus, but, as I'm sure is the case for a lot of people, once classes began and I began to actually be present on campus, I didn't read much for pleasure, and this book ended up taking me most of the school year to finish. The reason this is relevant is because I thought this was why I didn't like this book when I first read it. And I think it's solid reasoning. Taking forever to finish a book, especially a long one with lots of characters that takes place in different time periods, can make it difficult, if not impossible to engage with the greater story and its ideas. The experience of reading a book like this over the course of 8 months ends up being a protracted tour of disconnected chapters about characters you vaguely remember -- a very different experience of the book than if you read it in 2 weeks. So yeah, anyway, that's why I wanted to re-visit this. I had finished all the chapters in the past, but they were read as such distant snippets that I felt I hadn't really read the book at all.
Turns out this book is actually just really boring, and that even if I read this in 2 days I would still not like it. I made it about 350 pages this time, but I had to call it there, else I fell into a coma while reading. For a book with the kind of golden reputation as this one, with the blurbs on the front hailing it as "a wolf whistle of our half century" that "contains multitudes" (thanks for that, Mike Ondaatje), to be this dull...I just don't understand. There are good parts for sure, cause DeLillo can obviously write -- White Noise is a testament to that -- but yeah, on the whole, it's just boring, and DeLillo's prose, with a few exceptions, feels so lifeless. It's like he's trying really hard to be super meditative and deep all the time, and some of the time it does work, but on the whole, the writing-only-in-reverent-tones vibe becomes frustrating and ultimately so so boring. It's like every line ends in a deep, world-weary sigh. And it just gets so tiresome. Also DeLillo is hilariously obsessed with bringing sex into his prose in weird ways. Here's a great example that I marked: "I used to sit in the living room and listen fitfully through the urgent sexual throb of the dishwasher." He's talking about listening to his wife and mother talk about his father (who left when he was young) in the other room, by the way. What is sexual about that? Urgent sexual throb of the dishwasher. What the fuck does that even mean. I mean guess I can kind of see what he means, but why describe it that way? More than anything this line just made me laugh, and I really don't think that was Don's intention.
Anyway, this is a deeply boring book. Nick Shay is the most boring main character I've ever read. The dialogue is so annoying, so artificially realistic. So yeah. Not good. The Prologue is really good though. He should have just released it as a short story and called it there, moved on to something else. I should shoot him an e-mail.
Turns out this book is actually just really boring, and that even if I read this in 2 days I would still not like it. I made it about 350 pages this time, but I had to call it there, else I fell into a coma while reading. For a book with the kind of golden reputation as this one, with the blurbs on the front hailing it as "a wolf whistle of our half century" that "contains multitudes" (thanks for that, Mike Ondaatje), to be this dull...I just don't understand. There are good parts for sure, cause DeLillo can obviously write -- White Noise is a testament to that -- but yeah, on the whole, it's just boring, and DeLillo's prose, with a few exceptions, feels so lifeless. It's like he's trying really hard to be super meditative and deep all the time, and some of the time it does work, but on the whole, the writing-only-in-reverent-tones vibe becomes frustrating and ultimately so so boring. It's like every line ends in a deep, world-weary sigh. And it just gets so tiresome. Also DeLillo is hilariously obsessed with bringing sex into his prose in weird ways. Here's a great example that I marked: "I used to sit in the living room and listen fitfully through the urgent sexual throb of the dishwasher." He's talking about listening to his wife and mother talk about his father (who left when he was young) in the other room, by the way. What is sexual about that? Urgent sexual throb of the dishwasher. What the fuck does that even mean. I mean guess I can kind of see what he means, but why describe it that way? More than anything this line just made me laugh, and I really don't think that was Don's intention.
Anyway, this is a deeply boring book. Nick Shay is the most boring main character I've ever read. The dialogue is so annoying, so artificially realistic. So yeah. Not good. The Prologue is really good though. He should have just released it as a short story and called it there, moved on to something else. I should shoot him an e-mail.