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One was a book that everyone was reading: Don DeLillo's Underworld. I'd read the first chapter, then titled "Pafko at the Wall," when it was published in Harper's in 1993 and presumed that it was a self-contained novella (a brilliant one, the best fiction about baseball ever written and, I'm happy to admit, a piece that taught me all kinds of stuff that I was able to use in my own novel, The Veracruz Blues). When I heard that DeLillo had subsumed this masterpiece into a much longer novel, I could barely wait for its publication. The Friday the book came out, I stood outside the door of my local bookstore while a clerk opened the just-delivered boxes. I went home that weekend and read the book greedily, awestruck, afraid, and stunned by DeLillo's paranoid wonderland of material and technique. Underworld is that rare, big, advertised-as-good-for-you novel that makes good on its promises. Even better, I had the pleasure of being the first kid on my block to have read it, which I have spent the last few weeks lording over the many friends of mine who are now in the middle of the thing (I should not be proud of this, I know; sue me).
—Mark Winegardner
Library Journal
In DeLillo's newest...luminaries gathered in a box at the New York Polo Grounds to watch the Dodgers and the Giants battle it out for the pennant receive word that the Russians are testing an atomic bomb. DeLillo then flashes forward through a half-century of the Cold War as seen through the eyes of two protagonists briefly united by their passionate affair. BOMC and Quality Paperback Book Club main selections.
Martin Amis
....The new novel is Don DeLillo's wake for the cold war....Underworld surges with magisterial confidence through time...and through space...mingling fictional characters with various heroes of cultural history.
— The New York Times Books of the Century, Oct. 5, 1997
Joan Mellen
A page-turner and a masterwork.
— Baltimore Sun
Melvin Jules Bukiet
Utterly extraordinary....In its epic ambition and accomplishment, Underworld calls out for comparison with works...that have defined the consciousness of their age.
— Chicago Tribune
Greg Burkman
An astonishing piece of prose and a benchmark of 20th-century fiction, Underworld is stunningly beautiful in its generous humanity.
— Seattle Times
Michiko Kakutani
DeLillo's most affecting novel yet...a dazzling, phosphorescent work of art.
— The New York Times
Michael Dirda
Read and rejoice....Formidable characters, themes, language....Underworld delivers on every count.
— The Washington Post
David Wiegand
Underworld is [DeLillo's] best novel and perhaps that most elusive of creatures, a great American novel...
— San Francisco Chronicle
Kirkus Reviews
Working at the top of his form, DeLillo draws on his previous novels (Mao II, 1991, Libra, 1988, etc.) in shaping his most ambitious work yet, a grand Whitmanesque epic of postwar American life—a brainy, streetwise, and lyrical underground history of our times, full of menace and miracles, and humming with the bop and crackle of postmodern life.
DeLillo's bottom-up chronicle is also the history of garbage, from a rubble-strewn lot in the Bronx to nuclear waste dumps in the Southwest. And the true-blue American who spans these landscapes is one Nick Shay, now an executive with a waste-management firm, once a j.d. on the not-so-mean streets, where his father kept book and his mother worried her rosary for her two boys, the other a chess prodigy who later lends his mathematical genius to the weapons industry. From the '50s on, DeLillo's always accessible narrative is also the history of a baseball, the one that was the "Shot Heard Round the World," Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning home run in 1951. The fate of the actual ball, a relic of spiritual significance, seemingly lost, is also a lesson in enterprise. Snagged by a young black kid from Harlem, who identifies with Thomson's Homeric homer, the ball quickly becomes an object of commerce, purloined by the boy's desperate father. Eventually, Nick acquires it, but for him it more properly commemorates failure: Branca's losing pitch. Beyond garbage and baseball, DeLillo surveys the Cold War years with a satirist's eye for meaningful detail and a linguist's ear for existential patter.
Sweeping in scope and design, incorporating such diverse figures as Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover, DeLillo's masterpiece shouts against the times in the language of the times: postmodernism against itself. He kicks the rock of reality, teases out the connectedness of things, and leaves us in awe.
From the Publisher
Underworld is a “dazzling and prescient novel…A decade after 9/11, it’s worth rereading Don DeLillo’s 1997 masterpiece to appreciate how uncannily the author not only captured the surreal weirdness of life in the second half of the 20th century but also anticipated America’s lurch into the terror and exigencies of the new millennium...A breathtaking set piece…the prologue is a bravura display of Mr. DeLillo's literary powers."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Newsweek - Malcolm Jones
"There's pleasure on evey page of this pitch-perfect evocation of a half-century."
Michael Ondaatje
"The book is an aria and a wolf-whistle of our half century. It contains multitudes."
Bradford Morrow
The profundity, the intricacy, the beauty of Underworld leaves me in a state of awe. It’s one of a handful of novels that will come to define our culture in this century.
The San Diego Union-Tribune Arthur Salm
DeLillo’s breathtaking prose transforms this otherwise bleak wastelandinto a thrilling, brilliantly illuminated landscape.
The Denver Post Dorman T. Shindler
For those who love eloquent prose and powerful ideas, Underworld is an eight-course meal. . .. An eye-opener, a consciousness-raising treatise on modern America by a writerin love with the power of words and the country he calls his own.
The Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer Donn Fry
One of America’s greatest contemporary fiction writers illuminates American Cold War life and its obsessions, weaving history and imagination into a huge and compelling tapestry.
Elle Paul Elie
Reading DeLillo’s books bolsters out belief in the art of fiction: He catches the drift of end-of-the-century life in words, one bright shining sentence after another.
The Philadelphia Inquirer James Held
Precise, stark, gorgeous—something perhaps more properly termed a metaphysics of language, rendering and reflecting the mysteries of consciousness, those elusive meanings he and his character so passionately seek.
Chicago Tribune Books Melvin Jules Bukiet
Utterly extraordinary . . . in its epic ambition and accomplishment, Underworld calls out for comparison with works like those of Bely or Balzac that have defined the consciousness of their age.
Houston Chronicle Steven E. Alford
DeLillo understands the capacity of words to elevate us above the mundane, to establish a distance from things and a mastery over them, a power emerging from the capacity given to Adam, the ability to name.
The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review David Wiegand
His best novel and perhaps that most elusive of creatures, a great American novel . . . . a masterpiece in which the depth and reach of the commonplace are invested with universal scope and grandeur. Underworld is also a thrilling page-turner, propelling us along with realistic characters and those compelling details that make it impossible for them—or us—to escape the past.
London Observer William Boyd
In Underworld, we have a mature and hugely accomplished novelist firing on all cylinders, at the sophisticated height of his multifarious powers. Reading the book is a charged and thrilling aesthetic experience and one remembers gratefully that 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. The novel is the ‘great book of life’ and as long as there are human beings who are readers it will survive and, with a little luck,even flourish. Don DeLillo’s Underworld is a formidably potent and hugely encouraging testimonial to this undeniable,indomitable and strangely consoling fact.
The Nation John Leonard
Magnificent . . . a miracle.
Michael Herr
Underworld’s intellect, its view, its fabulous drama, its soul, its passion and compassion, and the beauty of the writing, just the size and generosity of it, are all of some spectacular high order. I can’t imagine any writer reading it without complete admiration and a kind of gratitude, because if a book like that can be written in a culture like this, it’s terrific for all of us.
Providence Journal-Bulletin Sam Coale
Anyone who wants to try to understand an appreciate the last half-century of life in these United States can do no better than read Don DeLillo’s magnificent, beautifully written and outrageously persuasive new novel, Underworld, unquestionably his masterpiece. . . . A triumphant performance.
The Plain Dealer Gary Lee Stonum
Underworld, DeLillo’s richest and most ambitious novel, seeks nothing less than the secret truths of modern America.
Harper’s Bazaar J. Hoberman
Majestic and playful . . . amazingly light and supple for so weighty and elegiac a construction, Underworld soars like a cathedral on the audacity of DeLillo’s connections.
The Boston Phoenix Adam Kirsch
In years to come, DeLillo’s novel will certainly be seen as a perfect document of our paranoid, teeming, deeply nostalgic age.
The Seattle Times - Greg Burkman
"Masterpieces teach you how to read them, and Underworld is no exception....Anastonishing piece of prose and a benchmark of twentieth-century fiction, Underworld is stunnigly beautiful in its generous humanity, locating the true power of history not in tyranny, collective political movements of history books, but inside each of us."
The Baltimore Sun - Joan Mellen
"Underworld is a page-turner and a masterwork, a sublime novel and a delight to read."
New York Observer Adam Begley
This novel will make you feel lucky to be alive and reading.
Harper’s Vince Passaro
The most personal and contemplative of DeLillo’s novels . . . Underworld confirms that contemporary American fiction’s most promising movement involves novels on a large social and historical scale that stretch the norms of narrative and language.
The New York Review of Books Luc Sante
Constantly pleasing not merely for the licked-finish illusionism with which he reproduces speech, or the camera eye he brings to bear on diverse contexts, but for the ways in which the renditions of those things will depart from the known or expected.
The Atlantic Monthly Tom LeClair
Courageous, ingenious and demanding, Underworld is a book to be talked about . . . for years to come.
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
Underworld is a “dazzling and prescient novel…A decade after 9/11, it’s worth rereading Don DeLillo’s 1997 masterpiece to appreciate how uncannily the author not only captured the surreal weirdness of life in the second half of the 20th century but also anticipated America’s lurch into the terror and exigencies of the new millennium...A breathtaking set piece…the prologue is a bravura display of Mr. DeLillo's literary powers."
Playboy Geoffrey Norman
The larger the canvas, the better DeLillo paints. He is a novelist of big themes . . . . Underworld is a tour de force.
GQ Thomas Mallon
DeLillo has written the first defining novel of what we are still calling the post-Cold War period.
Gay Talese
Astonishing. A sprawling and spectacular look at a half-century in American life as seen through a series of multiple visions that come flashing into our consciousness in ways that are endlessly enlightening and awesome in their insights. DeLillo has raised literary standards to new highs here, and yet the book is a page-turner, a scene-stealer, a triumph of language that takes us everywhere we’ve never been.
The New York Times Book Review Martin Amis
Underworld surges with magisterial confidence through time and through space.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Peter Wolfe
Magnificent . . . Underworld is the most powerful and original novel that DeLillo, one of the strongest American writers of our time, has written.
The Raleigh News and Observer Philip Gerard
Think of Underworld as a successor not to the great American novels of Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald, but to the Russian masterpieces of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. . . . Abig, multistoried, glorious, moving novel.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Phil Hanrahan
Underworld soars. Bigger andricher than anything Don DeLillo has done before, this multicharacter,time-leaping, sea-to-shining-sea dissection of Cold War American life isperilously good—so good, so strong, deep, knowing and funny, that you might betempted to read it and it alone, fanatically, the rest of your days.
Salman Rushdie
"Underworld is magnificent book by an American master."
Harpers Vince Passaro
The most personal and contemplative of DeLillo’s novels . . . Underworld confirms that contemporary American fiction’s most promising movement involves novels on a large social and historical scale that stretch the norms of narrative and language.
Harpers Bazaar J. Hoberman
Majestic and playful . . . amazingly light and supple for so weighty and elegiac a construction, Underworld soars like a cathedral on the audacity of DeLillo’s connections.
Harper’s Bazaar J. Hoberman
Majestic and playful . . . amazingly light and supple for so weighty and elegiac a construction, Underworld soars like a cathedral on the audacity of DeLillo’s connections.
Harper’s Vince Passaro
The most personal and contemplative of DeLillo’s novels . . . Underworld confirms that contemporary American fiction’s most promising movement involves novels on a large social and historical scale that stretch the norms of narrative and language.
The New York Times
A decade after 9/11, it's worth rereading Don DeLillo's 1997 masterpiece, "Underworld," to appreciate how uncannily the author not only captured the surreal weirdness of life in the second half of the 20th century but also anticipated America's lurch into the terror and exigencies of the new millennium.
The novel, whose original cover, unnervingly, features an image of the World Trade Center towers surrounded by fog and looming over a small church, focuses on the cold war years. But its portrait of life under the shadow of the atomic bomb — this thing "they had brought" into the world that "out-imagined the mind" — is immediately recognizable. As he did so astutely in earlier novels, Mr. DeLillo depicts an America in thrall to celebrity, technology and the mass media, a country afflicted with paranoia and confusion, a country in which there are no limits to the power of money, and "violence is easier now, it's uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore."
Though "Underworld" pivots around the experiences of one Nick Shay, a hero who shares his creator's Bronx childhood and Roman Catholic upbringing, it unfolds into a panoramic portrait of America, charting the intersecting lives of dozens of characters, famous and obscure — baseball fans and conspiracy fanatics, hustlers, con men, businessmen, scientists and artists. The novel moves from the streets of New York to the suburbs to the New Mexico desert, cutting back and forth from the 1950s to the 1990s, and in doing so gives us a visceral sense of how private lives and public events, the personal and the collective, can converge, with explosive force.
Readers put off by the novel's 800-plus page length should sample its prologue: a breathtaking 50-odd-page set piece that seamlessly captures the experience of 35,000 people watching the famous ballgame of Oct. 3, 1951, in which the Giants beat the Dodgers to win the pennant race — a game that happened to take place on the very same day that America learned that the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic bomb, and the cold war took a deadly new turn. This prologue is such a bravura display of Mr. DeLillo's literary powers, odds are the reader will be propelled through the rest of this dazzling and prescient novel. --(Michiko Kakutani)
