THE PILGRIM 'S HEART IS LIGHT AT THE COMMENCEMENT OF HIS JOURNEY

So I will strap on my backpack and don sturdy walking boots, an oxygen tank might be useful, and a supply of plasters and animal pelts - and then I will begin to scale the North Face of Modern American Literature. Let's see how far I get before I fall off one of its jagged cliffs or collapse choking with one of Mr DeLillo's sentences wrapped around my neck.

BUT DISCOURAGEMENTS ARISE UNBIDDEN

Update - Not even on page 100 and I have a sinking feeling. It's DeLillo's style. It's so very...er...ornate. No noun escapes without an adjective pinned to it, some of which are very odd - consider these from pages 63 to 65:

"... the little splat of human speech" [huh?:]
"A bled-white sky with ticky breezes" [ticky? like a clock?:]
"...a horseman with scabbarded rifle or a lone cameleer hunched in muslin on his dumb-headed beast"
"...the studded vegetation" [with what?:]
"...a clear night with swirled stars" [swirled?:]

Also this -

"There is something about old times that's satisfied by spontaneity. The quicker you decide, the more fully you discharge the debt to memory." Okay, what debt would that be? What's the logic here? Is this something our Don believes or is this something he wants us to believe this particular character believes? If so, why? Who has the time to figure out what it means anyway? Especially when there's another 762 ticky swirled studded scabbarded pages to go....

This isn't going so well.

DESPAIR INGULFS HIS HEART AND HE HEARS VOICES

And finally :

Once more despondent and unenthused, I zipped around the goodread reviews and found remarks such as

"... oh, god... this, this... painful verbal bukakefest is literally 800 pages of DeLillo jacking off at his computer over how deep and verbose he is. i wanted to punch him in the face and shake him, shouting, "JUST GET TO THE FUCKING PLOT, YOU SELF-LOVING PIECE OF SHIT." (from Ethan)

and

"I'll be honest and say that I don't remember much about this book other than an awful lot of baseball. This is partially because there is a lot of baseball in it" (from Chelsea)

and

"Ultimately, I don't think DeLillo knew what his story was about and tried to compenstate by adding more and more pages. Critics, never wanting to be the one who doesn't "get it", fawned and fellated the book, doing no favors to either the author or readers who mistakenly wade into this dank swamp and wonder why they're so dumb for not seeing the brilliance. And then they run back to James Patterson or Nicholas Sparks or some shit like that and we're all a little poorer in the end. ." (from Joseph)

and finally this from an online lit journal:

"Potentially intriguing plots which feature strongly in the earlier parts of the book - an intriguing serial killer subplot, the stories of each person who possesses the winning baseball - are abandoned halfway through the book in favour of overlong childhood memories or the inane ponderings of a performance artist; other stories are neglected for over 400 pages before reappearing at the end of the novel, causing an unwelcome jolt as the reader tries to remember the pertinent details."

THE PILGRIM CASTS THE DEVIL FROM HIM

I groaned and decided to place this great tome gently onto my "Abandoned Halfway And Will Never Finish Unless Some Very Unlikely DeLillo Fans Take My Family Hostage" shelf.

This was definitely my favorite book in 1997. Who wouldn't love a book where the main "character" is an iconic baseball that personifies the history of last half of the twentieth century?

An excellent example of the critical consensus being just plain wrong. Underworld is bloated, confused, and turgid - yet critics who should have known better drowned it in praise. I think this is due to a number of factors.

One, pedigree: DeLillo is a critical darling, deservedly so. Two, Heft: just like in movies, critics assume size equals importance, and thus the longer it takes to get through something, the more that something must have to say. It's 854 pages, 600 of which could have been cut. Three, it's Delillo, who rivals Toni Morrison and John Updike for riding the line between brilliant and laughably overwrought and critics will always prefer the "difficult" to the plainspoken. Fine by me - I don't have a problem with occasionally making the reader work for his/her supper. But there's a difference between challenging the reader and flexing your cleverness, and you can guess which one I think DeLillo does here. Ultimately, I don't think DeLillo knew what his story was about and tried to compenstate by adding more and more pages. Critics, never wanting to be the one who doesn't "get it", fawned and fellated the book, doing no favors to either the author or readers who mistakenly wade into this dank swamp and wonder why they're so dumb for not seeing the brilliance. And then they run back to James Patterson or Nicholas Sparks or some shit like that and we're all a little poorer in the end.

Underworld is an astonishing meditation on the second half of the American twentieth century. DeLillo has chosen to focus on the impact of the Cold War and not only the fear, but also the routine of it and how it impacted everyday people in subtle ways.

The prose was clear and beautiful, and never overwrought despite claims to the contrary. Drawing from a wide range of characters, DeLillo has created an accurate portrayal of the waste and ennui that seemingly dominated the latter half of the century.

Un mondo in pericolo

Underworld è un libro sovrassaturo di contenuti. E' ricco, straripante di riferimenti, di fatti, di concetti, di pensieri, di riflessioni, di arte moderna, di storia. Una carrellata di eventi che non segue apparentemente un filo logico e dove l'ago del tempo scorre su diverse direttrici.

Nel 1951, più o meno all'inizio della guerra fredda, ebbe luogo la partita di baseball Dodgers contro Giants con cui inizia il romanzo; contemporaneamente gli americani fecero esplodere un ordigno nucleare, come test, a fini militari. Il libro segue il percorso immaginario della palla leggendaria battuta da Bobby Thomson in quella partita, che lancia un fortissimo fuori campo; la palla, che passa di mano in mano, ci consente di seguire i principali eventi che avvengono in America fino alla fine della contrapposizione col blocco sovietico, con la caduta del muro.

La fine del blocco sovietico causa una crisi di valori e di identità negli americani, che vedevano nei russi un obiettivo, un antagonista, un fattore che li faceva sentire "uniti". Una volta che i russi non sono più il nemico da battere, che fare? Con chi prendersela? L'uomo ha bisogno di qualcosa in cui credere, di nemici da combattere, di idoli, di oggetti, di Dei. Su che valore convergere?

All'inizio della storia c'era il baseball, sport per il quale gli americani si potevano sentire uniti (più o meno come accade in Europa con i campionati di calcio). La palla lanciata da Thomson, filo conduttore di eventi, continua a ricordare il momento leggendario in cui tutti erano uniti.
Una palla che man mano che il tempo procede testimonia la decadenza dell'America (e perché no, del mondo intero): la guerra, le scorie radioattive, la società dei consumi, il danaro, gli interessi, la politica. La disumanizzazione dei valori.

Una società in crisi di valori tende a concentrarsi sugli oggetti, assegnando loro dei significati che, purtroppo, non possono avere. Oggetti che, per definizione fuggenti, sono destinati a diventare rifiuti, sommergendoci. Se procediamo così il mondo sarà presto distrutto. Dove stiamo andando? Stiamo inseguendo una utopia?

Uno spiraglio positivo Delillo lo lascia intuire: sono solo i valori che rimangono, i rapporti umani; non le cose. Ed è su quelli che dobbiamo concentrarci.

Un inizio strepitoso, una prosa raffinata e bellissima, riflessioni profonde e assolutamente degne di nota, uno stile caotico sul breve ma visionario sul lungo. Per me è un libro di 1772 pagine, ossia due volte 886. Perché alla prima lettura è quasi impossibile cogliere tutti i dettagli e i riferimenti incrociati (che non mi metto nemmeno a elencare, tanti sono).

Faticoso, indubbiamente, e tutt'altro che facile. Ma regala riflessioni e sensazioni impagabili.
Sono questi i libri per cui, dopo tutto, vale la pena leggere.

CRITIQUE:

“Underworld" as Found Art/Fiction

“Underworld" is fascinating in at least two ways: one relates to its use of metafiction, and the other relates to its implicit view of metaphysics:

"What did I see in this juxtaposition?"

"I believed in the stern logic of [connection]."

“Everything is Connected in the End”

A major theme of the novel is that “everything is connected in the end”. DeLillo goes one step beyond theme and uses this proposition as the foundation of the structure of the novel.

Shortly before he started to write “Underworld” in 1991, DeLillo read a copy of the front page of the New York Times dated October 4, 1951.

The paper fortuitously provided him with the coupled theme and structure of “Underworld”. He actually describes one of the characters in the novel making the same discovery:

n
“The front page astonished him, a pair of three-column headlines dominating. To his left the Giants capture the pennant, beating the Dodgers on a dramatic home run in the ninth inning. And to the right, symmetrically mated, same typeface, same-size type, same number of lines, the USSR explodes an atomic bomb – kaboom – details kept secret.” (668)

“He didn't understand why the Times would take a ball game off the sports page and juxtapose it with news of such ominous consequence.” (668)
n

The novel uses the same juxtaposition. DeLillo places these two events together (“a coupling all the same...symmetrically mated”), and fills the gaps, or allows the gaps to fill themselves. It’s a masterful experiment/exercise in how juxtaposition encourages content to bleed across and between parts of the framework:

“Find the links. It's all linked.” (577)

DeLillo lets the novel's plots "dance their way out."

The Novel as an Object Passing Through

What links many chapters is the fate of the baseball that was hit into the stands and supposedly found by a young boy called Cotter Martin. In the body of the novel, DeLillo writes:

n  
n  “The ball was an object passing through.”n  
n

The narrative is anything but “the linear arrangement of words on a page". (503) It is a remarkable web, almost like cyberspace, that contains multitudes and lends itself to exploration by HTML.

The Novel as Characters Passing Through

Nick Shay is a principal character, who at some point has bought the baseball for $34,500 from a dealer in memorabilia, Marvin Lundy, who has managed to track its lineage/ provenance to the day after the game. What he doesn’t know is that Cotter gave it to his father, Manx Martin, for safekeeping, but his father went out and sold it on the street for approximately $33 to Charles Wainwright. Charles later gives it to his own son, Chuckie, who becomes a navigator of B-52’s that carry atomic bombs. His plane is called Long Tall Sally.



These planes were commonly called BUFF’s (big ugly fat fucks) by the men of the US bomber command. By 1991, most of the planes had been retired to an aircraft boneyard in Arizona, where an artist known as Klara Sax paints them. Klara was formerly married to Albert Bronzini, a science teacher who taught Nick’s brother (Matty) how to play competitive chess. In 1992, Matty is a scientist working at a nuclear weapons facility in New Mexico. Nick had an adulterous sexual relationship with Klara when they both lived in New York in 1951. His own wife, Marian, later has an affair with Nick's work colleague, Brian Glassic. The relationships between women and men are problematic for Nick.

Young Nick was convicted of the murder of George Manza (the Waiter) with his [George's] own shotgun and sentenced to detention in a correctional facility for juveniles. While Nick feels guilty about George’s death, he’s never been sure whether the death was intentional or accidental, because George had told him that the shotgun was unloaded. Nick works in waste management, and in the prologue flies to Russia and Kazakhstan to witness the test of a waste disposal system that destroys toxic waste in a nuclear explosion. The Russian connection posits a link between weapons and waste. It also marks the end of the Cold War.

Collect/Connect/Correct

As might be apparent from this summary, there is not just a concern with connections. DeLillo structures the novel around the words "collection" (“people collect, collect, always collecting” baseball memorabilia), "connection" and "correction" (of juvenile criminals).

Lucky Strikes

The cigarette brand, Lucky Strikes, also features in the novel. It’s possible that the home runs were the result of a lucky strike, the Soviet nuclear test equally so (from their point of view), and the death of George the Waiter an unlucky strike (from both points of view).

Opposition and Conflict

Just as there are connections between subject matter in the novel, “there’s a lot of opposition and conflict…It's the rule of confrontation...” (27)

There’s a thin line between rivals, antagonists and enemies. The baseball game was the final between the Giants and the Dodgers on October 3, 1951, while the Soviet nuclear explosion was a defining move in the Cold War. By the end of the prologue, the Cold War appears to have ended in “these wild privatised times…and the marathon of danced-out plots...”

The conflict is an existential threat to everybody present. DeLillo frequently refers to the characters’ being and existence. They participate in episodes, experiences and events, which together constitute history. What remains, lasts or survives is waste, which is “the secret history, the underhistory, the way archaeologists dig out the history of early cultures, every sort of bone heap and broken tool, literally from under the ground.” (791)

Going Underground

Nick’s life has been shaped by his father’s abandonment of his family when Nick was just 11 years of age:

n
“The earth opened up and he stepped inside...I think he went under. I don't think he wanted a fresh start or a new life or even an escape. I think he wanted to go under.” (809)
n

In one of several films shown in the novel (including the Zapruder film, Robert Frank's "Cocksucker Blues", and the Texas Highway Killer video), the fictitious “Unterwelt”, “All Eisenstein wants you to see, in the end, are the contradictions of being...You see the inner divisions of people and systems...” (444)

“The Full Weight of Observation”

As he was in his earlier novels, DeLillo remains preoccupied with the mystery of language and the mystery behind and between words:

n
“What mattered were the mysteries, not the language in which you said them.” (757)
n

His metaphysics seems to be more based on Jesuit science than post-modern philosophy:

n
“We can't see the world clearly until we understand how nature is organised. We need to count, measure and test. This is the scientific method. Science. The observation and description of phenomena. Phenomena. Things perceptible to the senses.” (734)

“How is it that a few marks chalked on a blackboard, a few little squiggly signs can change the shape of human history?...I want to know how it is that a few marks on a slate or a piece of paper, a little black on white, or white on black, can carry so much information and contain such shattering implications. Never mind the energy packed in the atom. What about the energy contained in this equation (E equals MC squared)? This is the real power. How the mind operates. How the mind identifies, analyses and represents. What beauty and power. What marvels of imagination does it require to reduce the complex forces of nature, all those unseeable magical actions inside the atom – to express all this with a bing and a bang on a blackboard.” (736)
n

The Jesuitical Novel

Nick makes the Jesuitical influence even more explicit:

n
“The Jesuits taught me to examine things for second meanings and deeper connections.” (88)
n

In the end, DeLillo's quest for meaning and connection becomes a plea for the cessation of hostilities between nations and ideologies, and a declaration of peace in the battle of the sexes.



FOUND VERSE:
[In the Words of Don DeLillo]

Sister Edgar Reads Poe at School
[Mostly In the Words of Don DeLillo]

She paced the floor and would become
The poem and the raven both,
A fearless bird, roman-nosed,
Gliding out of the timeless sky,
Defining its own airy path
And diving down upon the class.


The Telemetry of Crowds

An understanding
Seemed to travel
Through the audience,
Conveyed row by row
In that mysterious
Telemetry of crowds.
Or maybe not so mysterious.


Tangerine Dream

Language is webbed
In the senses,
Out of sand-blaze
Brilliance into
Touch, taste and
Fragrance.


The Safe Place of Imagination

Those bedridden days
Of childhood
When he was islanded
In sheets and pillows,
Surrounded by books
And chess pieces,
Deliciously sick at times,
A fever that sent him inward,
Sea-sweats and dreams
With runny colours,
Lonely but not unhappy,
The room a world,
The safe place of imagination.


Longing for Disarray

I long for the days of disarray,
When I didn't give a damn
Or a fuck or a farthing.


Secretion

What we excrete
Comes back
To consume us.


From the Beach to the Bronx

They had the rear seat
To themselves
On the ride back,
The motor right below them,
Heat beating up,
And they dozed
On each other's shoulders,
Faces sun-tight and eyes
Stinging slightly,
Tired, hungry, happy,
The bus belching heat
Beneath them.


A Little Bitty Breeze

Later, the young men
Will stand on corners,
Smoking as the lights go out,
Bullshitting the night away,
And people will sleep
On fire escapes,
Here and there,
Because there's a breath
Of air outside,
A little bitty breeze
That changes everything.


SOUNDTRACK:

Emma Swift - "I Contain Multitudes" (Written by Bob Dylan)

"Underworld...contains multitudes." — Michael Ondaatje

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZhzH...

Emma Swift - "Queen Jane Approximately" (Written by Bob Dylan)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R94s...

Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard 'Round The World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsyYM...

Robert Frank and The Rolling Stones - "Cocksucker Blues 35th Anniversary Special Edition"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN3nB...

The Man Who Saw America
"Looking back with Robert Frank, the most influential photographer alive."
New York Times-2 Jul 2015


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/mag...

"The [Rolling] Stones’ lawyers worried that the explicitness would create problems and forbade screening it unless Frank was in attendance. As a result, the all-but-unavailable '[Cocksucker] Blues' is a celluloid apparition. The novelist Don DeLillo watched a cheap bootleg reproduction. He’d admired Frank’s photographs for the way they 'imply a story or a sociology,' but the film, De­Lillo thought, was different. 'There’s nothing behind it. There’s something pure.' In DeLillo’s 'Underworld,' as characters view the film, De­Lillo describes at length its crepuscular, edge-of-time feeling."

The Rolling Stones - "Cocksucker Blues"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BErPC...

Zapruder film

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqzJQ...

Josef Von Sternberg - "Underworld"/"Unterwelt"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgwLt...

DeLillo refers to a film called "Unterwelt" by Sergei Eisenstein.

The Jam - "Going Underground"

https://youtu.be/AE1ct5yEuVY

Elastica - "Connection" (Live on Letterman)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnpYD...

Purtroppo ho fatto un casino con questo libro che mi aveva consigliato molto tempo fa un amico dopo averlo messo nel programma di un suo corso di teoretica e così non ho molto da dire: ne lessi in una vacanza invernale di tanti anni fa quasi 600 pagine, in un batter d'occhio. Mi piacevano, le storie e le ambientazioni diverse e come erano raccontate. Poi al ritorno è rimasto da parte, impossibile proseguire con 1-2 pagine per sera, meglio aspettare un momento migliore, che non è mai arrivato... o meglio, per qualche strano impulso mi sono obbligata a finirlo ora, ma, non avendo voglia di ricominciare daccapo, l'ho terminato ricordando davvero poco di tutto quel che precedeva. Ovvio che mi sia persa molto, anche se non si tratta di una narrazione sequenziale, alla fine in qualche modo diversi fili si intrecciano, ma non è certamente questo. E' propriamente l'afflato di un'opera gigante che ho rovinato sgonfiandolo in questa lettura irrispettosa, e se pur non l'ho completamente perso, intuisco quale lettura più ricca sarebbe stata per me oggi. Questo è un libro faticoso per la densità di elementi e per la quantità di direzioni intraprese e che per certi versi non arrivano propriamente da nessuna parte, ma Delillo imbastisce una rappresentazione narrativa del mondo davvero complessa, affascinante, efficace e raffinata, per giunta triste, cioè tristemente veritiera. L'epilogo è un crescendo alquanto potente e senza esito.

Underworld is a book that seems to divide people into two camps. Camp A believes the book is an amazing tour de force. Camp B sees this book as pretentious load of rubbish. Both camps agree the other side are morons. To be fair Camp A uses rougher language. See goodreads comments section.

I thought I would be in Camp B, suffering stolidly through pretentious page after pretentious page. Actually reading it though was a delight. The language is amazing, vivid, and as seductively charming as this rather odd description of cheesecake.

“The cheesecake was smooth and lush with personality of a warm well to do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.”

While that didn’t really make me want to put the cake in my mouth I could read descriptions like that all day, every day. The characters both historical and not are vividly drawn, with Marvin Lundy a particular joy. Which is handy because at 800 plus pages it does take days. The story itself was not entirely clear to me, monumental arc of history, living in the shadow of nuclear destruction, celebration of popular culture, baseball - your guess is as good as mine. I didn’t care, I just enjoyed every grand ambitious moment of it.

If you are in camp B, no slurs from me but maybe when the mood strikes give it another go.

First of all, this book is not an easy read: it meanders through space and time (from the Bronx to Kazakstan from the fifties to the nineties and back), it deals with subjects such as baseball (the opening chapter!) I hardly know anything about and there are lots of characters that pop up and disappear to make their comeback about 250 pages later. I can understand a lot of readers just break off.

But I must say that something compelled me to read on, I don't know what. Maybe it was the idea that everything is connected, the idea that the life of a poor mother raising her two kids alone after the father had left for cigarettes and never come back is linked to the life of politicians who played an important role in the Cold War.

I am sure this book has an underworld of different layers as well, waiting to be discovered after a second and third read. Actually I would like to start again from the beginning, but unfortunately other books are waiting. So I won't.

I like DeLillo’s writing and loved the baseball opening in Underworld. However, I didn’t like any of the adult characters in the book and secondly there wasn’t enough drama or at least the kind I care about. Portions of the book were written really well, I just wanted something more like Bonfire of the Vanities where at least the circumstances were interesting. Maybe I just don’t care about the underworld.

3.5 stars. White Noise, by DeLillo, is a much better book and more tightly constructed in my opinion.

Underworld, an already evocative title for a novel, is made more so when coupled with its cover's depiction of the covered-with-clouds Twin Towers approached by a bird in flight angled in an eerily airplane-looking way (this book came out in 1997). Not to mention several passages regarding the Twin Towers which read with new resonance after 9/11. But that isn't really what the novel is about; it's an opportune accidental feeling carried throughout the book. I digress.

DeLillo begins Underworld with pages describing Bobby Thomson's walk-off home run (afterward called The Shot Heard 'Round the World). DeLillo places the reader at this game in the crowd at the legendary Polo Grounds in New York; you needn't enjoy baseball to be subsumed by DeLillo's brilliance at placing you in that setting. Thomson's home run, which clinched the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants, erupts an emotional fanbase into pandemonium. A young fan, Cotter Martin, who sneaked in to watch the game, eventually snags the incredibly historic home run away from another fan he'd just befriended. DeLillo (and history) describes this game as the same day the Russians tested a nuclear bomb. The Cold War has commenced, and the baseball takes the reader through time (the years between 1951 and 1997), as it passes through the hands of various owners. The narrative explains the American experience of Russia vs. America while mingling fictional characters with various heroes and villains of cultural history (Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, Lenny Bruce among others). Underworld covers the conflict in close detail and from a street-level perspective. It's definitely a novel for anyone fascinated by global politics, media, and culture.

Klara and Nick, the main characters, meet up in an Arizona desert in the 1990s and meander back in time as the story jumps chronologically through them and others until the early 1950s. Big events play out on the national stage, and each character's motivations and circumstances are shown, hinting that each life story shares synchronicity; the snapshots of the characters slowly intertwine into each others' lives.

The baseball is viewed by many of the characters as an object with a history; by simply owning the ball they feel they'll also get the history that comes along with it. A preacher in the book discusses how history's found in the most common of places -- only that it's hidden where few think to look. By learning the history of objects the characters become more focused on themselves and society. Some characters deal in various types of waste: human waste, nuclear waste, garbage, etc. Every product, package, wrapper, or explosion has a consequence. This is the core of Underworld -- it is the waste that humankind feverishly tries to hide away like a secret. But it's always there, and eventually, we're forced to confront the waste we create and the fears that we hide behind, holding us back from true desires.

Sure, the chronology is a bit jumbled, but it all ties together in the end. The rewards of persevering through this dizzying novel are endless. The dialogue-driven narrative means that good listeners will enjoy this book. Reading DeLillo (any novel, especially White Noise) before Underworld will help an intimidated reader, but is not a necessity. In brevity, Underworld finds the roots of today in the small moments of the past.

Postscript: DeLillo has said that the inspiration for Underworld was the October 4, 1951 front page of The New York Times (look it up). Essential reading: the Lenny Bruce comedy routines about the Cuban Missile Crisis in the novel. If, AND ONLY IF you can't make it through the entire book, read the first section about the baseball game, and then the Lenny Bruce routines which are found on pages 504-9, 544-8, 580-6, 590-5, and 623-33. They are remarkable in context of the novel but are able to be read independently of the story with great results. Upon finishing the novel, these were the areas that I shuffled back to immediately.

I'd been looking forward to reading this for ages, and it failed to disappoint. Underworld is one heck of a novel, and when I think of the breathtaking opening sequence at the Dodgers—Giants 1951 game I had the feeling something truly remarkable was on the cards. It was like DeLillo sat there in the stadium with eagle eyes. His capacity for details throughout the whole 827 pages was just monumental. The only thing that bothered me prior to reading this, is just how much of the novel is actually about baseball—something I don't know that much about—and apart from the prologue which details a boy, Cotter, fighting his way through the crown to claim the ball after the winning home run, I would go on to learn that it's only the ripple effect of this one game, not about the technicalities of baseball, thankfully. If anything, the novel is more about garbage than it is baseball. One thing that struck me with Underworld, is that DeLillo has rarely engaged on an emotional level in regards to his characters, but here, as he floats back and forth over five decades of history, I thought he was at his most affecting, by presenting not only an open world of big events but also a concealed one in which individuals and their private emotions are connected by the hope and loss in an ever changing America. Seeing as I started this roughly a couple of months ago, I only now wish I had noted certain things down as I progressed, as there is simply so much to touch on. If there is a main story buried in there somewhere then it's that of Nick Shay, his juvenile crime, his family, his link to the game-winning ball, his Bronx childhood, middle age in the Southwest, old time lover, Klara Sax, his memories. But this is only part of the massive cinematic scope and multiple subplots and characters that DeLillo—with an absolute pin-sharp prose—delves into. From the Cuban Missile Crisis, graffiti artists, and conspiracies, to highway killers, nuns, waste management, and so much more, this is a writer who was clearly at the peak of his powers here. That's all his major novels now done, and my 11th overall. I'm still going to say that Libra is the better book, but, despite this, Underworld is the one I'll think about the most in years to come. I'm sure of that.