Underworld

A Novel

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by Don DeLillo

Scribners/Free Press

Due/Published July 1998, 832 pages, paper

ISBN 0684848155

New in paper!

It's simple--don't miss it! Read it. You won't be sorry. And now it's even in paper. This book got positive reviews all over. Here are a few bits:

"DeLillo offers us another history of ourselves, the unofficial underground moments. . . .This book is an aria and a wolf whistle of our half-century."--Michael Ondaatje

Astonishing. . . . DeLillo has raised literary standards to new highs here, and yet the boook is a page turner, a scene-stealer, a triumph of language that takes us everywhere we've never been."--Gay Talese

"In 10 previous novels, DeLillo has established a reputation as one of our most dazzling chroniclers of the cultural vectors shaping the American fin-de-siecle. He unveils here his broadest canvas to date, a sweeping secret history of the cold War and a portrait of the fantasy life of a nation as played out on a vast and ofted tragic scale.

Befitting a history of dueling superpower, the novel begins in a city divided by the final game of the 1951 penant race between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. DeLillo's narrative voice soars and careens through the stadium, embracing a range of characters, from Cotter, a scrappy Harlem teenager to Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, and J. Edgar Hoover. Shortly after Hoover is informed that the Russians have just tested an atomic bomb, the game itself is decided with Bobby Thompson's 'shot heard 'round the world.' The trajectory of that baseball, which Cotter retrieves in the bleachers, then becomes a thread that ingeniously connects the events that follow, like the arc of the V-2 rocket in Gravity's Rainbow, a novel whose Manichaean landscape of control and paranoia DeLillo often invokes.

The novel leaps ahead to the 1990s and then spools backwards in time, shuttling between 'the endless inspired catastrophe of New York' and the southwestern desert--the testing ground of the American arms race. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, DeLillo traces the aftermath of a brief tryst that transpired in the Bronx in the 1950s between Nick Shay, a 17 year-old hoodlum, and Klara Sax, the wife of Albert Bronzino, a science teacher and mentor to Nick's brother, a chess prodigy. When Nick accidentally kills a man, he is sent to a Jesuit school, where he gels into the quintessential DeLillo-ian anti-hero. Introspective and bookish, he becomes an executive at a Phoenix-based corporation that manages hazardous waste, rising from the ashes of his childhood and raising a family of his own, while obsessively tracing the Bobby Thompson home run ball through a netherworld of baseball trivia. Meanwhile Klara has become a conceptual artist, repurposing waste, supervising an immense Christo-loke project in the desert, painting B-52 bombers and other military castoffs. In a tightly plotted, massive feat of cultural history, DeLillo detours through the AIDS- and drug-ravaged ghetto of the contemporary Bronx to the weapons plants wher Matt Shay uncovers the concerous legacy of American atomic testing. There is also Lenny Bruce riffing on global catastrophe and the 1970s art scene of New York, where Klara attends a screening of Unterwelt, a fictitious lost film by Eisenstein. DeLillo's dark humor emerges in passages about the shrink-wrap culture of 1950s, free-wheeling gags on the apocalypse, sex, and celebrity, and the number 13 that weaves its way through the novel in a check-pattern of bad luck, condoms, and vast, mythical mountains of trash.

Mapping not one, but a whole dense network of underworlds, DeLillo succeeds here at reclaiming the cultural unconscience of a generation. True to its multilayered perspective, the novel offers not just a jeremiad for the nuclear age, but a vision that is also hopeful, one that envisions both a god in the garbage an the rebirth of a nation betrayed by its fathers and by its own desires."--Publishers Weekly

Review

Don DeLillo, certainly one of the best American contemporary novelists, has written a new novel that attempts nothing less than examining the history of the Cold War. Beginning with Bobby Thomson's famous "shot heard round the world", the book encompasses such figures as Lenny Bruce, Mick Jagger, J. Edgar Hoover, along with other events of the post-war era as it follows its two main characters Nick Shay and Klara Sax. Obviously at 827 pages, no summary would really do this book justice. Nevertheless, Delillo's latest effort is one of the best novels in the past few years and is certainly worth reading.