i've only put down three books in my entire life.

the first was Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," which i absolutely loved but got terribly sick of after about 700 pages of the same goddamn philosophy being crammed down my throat. (which sounds like its awful, but i really did adore those first two thirds).

the second was a speed reading book. it wasn't a very quick read, and i got bored.

the third is now Don DeLillo's Underworld, supposedly one of the greatest masterpieces of 20th century literature.

i have no shame in saying that i stopped reading this bullshit after 550 pages. because as "brilliant" as DeLillo may be (and granted, he does have a more-than-firm grasp on the english language and on the power of dialogue), he is absolutely, hands down, one of the most long winded, convoluted writers i have ever read.

i've done "White Noise," and got through it without too much discomfort, but was ultimately let down by the end. and i mean that in both senses of the phrase--the ending sucked, and i was considerably less interested by the time the book ended than when i started. nevertheless, i'd still recommend it for certain redeeming qualities.

but this one... 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."

there's nothing wrong with elegant, poetic writing, even in novel form. but without a fucking interesting narrative?

last time i checked, a novel is defined as:
1.ta fictitious prose narrative of considerable length and complexity, portraying characters and usually presenting a sequential organization of action and scenes.

yeah, i get it: he's such a fucking genius because of the way he weaves esoteric and seemingly unrelated themes throughout the lives of dozens of characters within a bevvy of settings and a nonlinear timeframe.

but WHO FUCKING CARES?

if its boring and the characters suck, who really fucking CARES? i don't want to read that shit. i could crack open my 10th grade chemistry textbook for that.

i came here to read a STORY, Don. it's a shame you couldn't help.

Underworld is the most inconsistent book I have ever read. At some times, especially in the first 100 pages, I thought it might be a new addition to my "favorites" shelf, yet at others, I was ready to write a scathing one star review.

I think the best way to explain the problem with Underworld is to look at the design of the book itself. It's a thick 827 pages, yet the pages are well spaced and the text is large print. Underworld, to me, seems as if it started as a short, well controlled novel, later bloated and expanded to fill a larger format. It contains too many moving parts and myriad characters to count as a restrained microcosm, yet it isn't nearly long or detailed enough to register as a massive macrocosm. It is stuck halfway. The book either needed to lose or gain 400 pages. Much shorter, DeLillo could condense the best parts of his book (the prologue and epilogue, the story of Esemerela, the Eisenstein film, etc.), into a series of breathtaking vignettes. Much longer, DeLillo could expand the book into a sort of "Recognitions" like portrait of America, a painting filled in with dozens and dozens of stories. As is, Underworld is bloated, containing a few moments of beauty padded by pages and pages of meandering.

The structure of the book is promising. Bookended by two (excellent) short stories, the novel moves backwards, a plunge into the history of America, broken intermittently by fragments of a story called "Manx Martin" that moves forwards. DeLillo scatters leitmotifs throughout the text to keep control of the narrative and render it coherent. The two main characters, Nick and Klara, are massively dull. Come to think of it, there's only one truly powerful personality in Underworld; the comedian Lenny.

DeLillo flirts with the idea of exploring paranoia, but it is massively watered down. Most of the "paranoia" in the novel is centered around the recurring number 13. It's not really "poorly written" so much as entirely unimpressive next to Pynchon. And his vignettes of American life pale in comparison to Gaddis's in "The Recognitions". Underworld is like a weird mix between the two novels that does not commit to its own vision. So much of this novel is dull and wandering.

On more positive notes, the prologue is justly famous, and the epilogue is just as good, but less talked about. The book is easy to read, and the language is fairly simple. There really are flashes of genius throughout. But they are drowning in pages where DeLillo seems to be trying to figure out himself what he's writing about. He's constantly gesturing towards vague profundity that he cannot or will not define.

I do highly recommend that you read this book, there's much to discuss and much to like. But I think DeLillo isn't cut out so much for the mega-novel. His shorter works - to me - are more interesting by far. I feel as though Underworld might be divided into three much more interesting short novels of about 300 pages each. Taken together, they are dissatisfying and weirdly incomplete. And so I'm left with the odd case of a three star rating that feels both too stingy and too generous.

There is no review here. I’m merely registering a score.

It’s been years since I last picked up a DeLillo. This one’s been waiting far too long. I rewatched the Cosmopolis movie last week. It’s not good. Underworld is pretty fine.

My motivation was this. There are Underworld detractors on gr who I’m almost certain should have known better. There are Underworld boosters on gr who have never (not quite) convinced me. So I set out to do that thing which I rarely need to bother doing myself, Making up my own mind about a gargantuan postmodern tome. I had already four DeLillos tucked away, but hadn’t quite decided about him. Underworld would be a break it or make it? Maybe.

Results. The detractors should know better. This is a pretty great novel. The boosters I think oversell a bit. I’ll be reading more DeLillo.

Here’s the thing. During most of my reading of Underworld I felt it pulled in two directions, in the directions of two other novels; Women and Men and Infinite Jest. Clearly for different reasons. And I thought both of those novels did what they did better than how Underworld did it. In part because Underworld gave me that rare experience of feeling a bulking novel was slightly too baggy. I mean maybe fifty pages too baggy ; but mostly the bagginess would have been fixed probably by adding more pages. No need to take stuff out. But sometimes, and perhaps here in Underworld, that pace is important and “tightening it up” would have destroyed the rhythm which comes with a certain spaciousness. At any rate, I got the century-long expansiveness in a richer measure with Women and Men and I got the pyrotechnic/smart prose better in Infinite Jest. Not to mind.

But one thing’s for sure ; stop boosting that short story that begins the novel. It’s an overture. You know The Lone Ranger, but do you know William Tell? “Das Kapital”, the epilogue, is also quite fine.

"You have a history," she said, "that you are responsible to."

"What do you mean by responsible to?"

"You're responsible to it. You're answerable. You're required to try to make sense of it. You owe it your complete attention." (512)

A remarkable novel and a breathtaking experience. DeLillo is a master wordsmith who always seems to have exactly the right word, the right phrasing, the right...je ne sais quois, but the way he captures the granular density of everyday experience, his thoughtful reflection that calls to attention the real but hard to pin down thoughts and feelings which surround us daily... It's uncanny. DeLillo shifts fluidly between scenes, and like oil and water things briefly intermingle before separating into distinct, unmixed wholes. Lingering on the small scraps of everyday experience, DeLillo exhorts us see them for more than what they are. To breathe purpose into them, to fan an ember of life here and there, to build a stronger flame with limited fuel.

"We took junk and saved it for art. Which sounds nobler than it was. It was just a way of looking at something more carefully. And I'm still doing it, only deeper maybe." (393)

The thing that strains credibility is that everyone is extremely clever, or wise, or profound. The book exalts common things by making them anew, reimagined, exaggerated in gracious caricaciture, stylized. It gives things meaning, and DeLillo is so sure and so sage-seeming that I want to believe him. Imagine walking around just knowing, knowing in your very soul, that things have meaning. That things have significance, importance, and purpose. DeLillo seems confident, but I've got my doubts.

"Reality doesn't happen until you analyze the dots." (182)

This is the story of America, the story of hidden histories, the story of the lives we lead and the parallels we don't, the story of the stories we tell ourselves. It's about growing up, growing old, looking back, wondering what it's all been about in the end.

"You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life." (170)

This is the story of a nation in sudden shocking freefall, a land of myths now turning historyless, where every tale we tell crackles with new significance because it is we who tell it.

"That particular life. Under the surface of ordinary things. And organized so that it makes more sense in a way, if you understand what I mean. It makes more sense than the horseshit life the rest of us live." (761)

This is the story of absent fathers, the greedy and selfish who set wheels in motion then depart, and the story of those left behind and the ways they try to make some meaning of it all.

This goddamn country has garbage you can eat, garbage that's better to eat than the food on the table in other countries. (767)

This is the story of things we do, and the trash we leave behind.

A strew of lost and found and miscellaneous things that were stored here not for future use but because they had to go somewhere. (769)

5 stars. A book of haunting melancholy, pregnant with meaning and full of emotion.

I'm surprised to see how many people here had the exact same reaction I did. They start reading, they find a few bits that seem quite gripping and well-written, they lose momentum, and they stop. Some hypotheses:

- None of us are smart enough to get the point.

- There is a clear point, but you have to reach the end to discover what it is, and we didn't have the requisite fortitude. (Also, it must be like The Mousetrap: readers who find out are sworn not to reveal it).

- The point is that life feels this way if you're a certain kind of person, i.e. interesting in places but ultimately pretty meaningless.

- The book just isn't very good.

Now that I write it down, I do feel vaguely interested in discovering which of the above guesses is closest to the truth. But not interested enough to open it again.

When I try to imagine Untitled, the spectacularly unsuccessful novel that Richard writes in Martin Amis's The Information, I must admit that the first thing I think of is Underworld. At least DeLillo's book doesn't cause nose-bleeds, sinus headaches or inexplicable drowsiness. Okay, maybe the last one.
__________________________________________

I note with interest that Karl Ove Knausgård is another member of the club. A passage from near the end of Min kamp 2 (he has just visited a bookstore and made some purchases):

DeLillo-romanen angret jeg på i det samme jeg kom ut, for selv om jeg en gang hade hadde vært fan av ham, særlig romanene The Names og White Noise, hadde jeg ikke klart å lese mer en halve av Underworld, og siden neste bok hadde vært forferderlig, var det åpenbart at han var på hell.

My translation:

I regretted the DeLillo novel the moment I came out, since even if I once had been a fan, particularly of the novels The Names and White Noise, I hadn't been able to read more than half of Underworld, and considering that the next book had been terrible, it was clear he was on the way down.

“Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.”

The Great American novel? A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius? DeLillo's Magnum Opus? The Perfect Culmination of his Work?

Is Underworld any of these things? Maybe?

Categorizing it like this is meaningless, not because *insert some platitude here about its sheer transcendence of those categories*, but because it genuinely just doesn't matter. Who cares?

I can tell you that it is an extremely powerful novel, at times exhaustive and exhausting, at other times deeply mystical and esoteric in its industrial landscapes. I can also tell you that DeLillo has important things to say about our state of affairs, whether they be geopolitical, cultural, ideological or personal.

I can tell you that some parts of the novel, have faded from memory, other parts I remember very well: I remember DeLillo's construction of a new Sergei Eisenstein film, Unterwelt, projected for the first time in Radio City Music Hall in New York. I remember his haunting chapters dedicated to cold war comedian Lenny Bruce in the wake of the Cuban Crisis, where Bruce proclaims "we're all gonna die!". I remember the Graffiti kids of the ghetto, who construct angels on trains and walls for every dead and forgotten child in The Bronx. I remember Nick Shay, the teenager delinquent, and Nick Shay, the adult "waste cosmologist". I remember how I felt and what I thought when I read those parts.

I could write several essays about the structure and meaning of the book, and I'm sure many people have and I'm sure they were good essays. However, in the end, all that really matters is whether or not it moved me, whether it made sense to me personally. After finishing it, all I can think is that it did. It did move me, it did make sense to me and it became something special to me. Thank you, Donald Richard DeLillo.

Edit: if you are one of the people who found Delillo's ramblings tiring and excessive, I would genuinely recommend you push through to the second half of the book. The second half contains some incredible storytelling and exposition. If anyone has seen the films of Taiwanese director Edward Yang, the second half of Delillo's book is a lot like Yang's movies.

When you write an 800+ page novel, you have to give the reader something to hold on to, whether it's character, plot -- whatever. I spent two days diving into Don DeLillo's Underworld, and I still had nothing. The characters were unremarkable, the action rather muted (except for the exciting prologue at the 1951 Dodgers-Giants baseball game). I don't know why some readers like Underworld, unless as a badge of honor for surviving the experience of reading it.

With every DeLillo novel I read, I realize that Underworld is the pinnacle of the man's artistry. Every novel he wrote beforehand leads up to it, hints at it, contains thematic foreshadowings of it, and the sixty-odd pages of Cosmopolis I've read are so far from this that it seems DeLillo understood there was no going back to his older style, because he'd already perfected it. This, of course, invites the possibility that DeLillo could release another masterpiece in his later style, but with the man getting up there age-wise and with Underworld having twenty-plus years of DeLillo Mark I (or DeLillo Marks I and II, depending on how you define terms) to draw on, it's hard for me to see him ever topping this.

Like most of the major postmodern novels, Underworld is a beast of a book. It's long, it's dense, its character roster is massive, and it runs through the twentieth century's eventful second half with grace, insight, and humor. Real-life figures such as J. Edgar Hoover, Lenny Bruce, and Sergei Eisenstein all factor in, with Bruce brought to vivid and hilarious life throughout several chapters towards the novel's end. It begins with a breathless retelling of Bobby Thompson's shot heard 'round the world juxtaposed against another such shot, the Russian testing of a nuclear warhead, and ends with an equally breathless tale of poverty, terrorism and the internet. If you've only experienced DeLillo through the artful awkwardness of White Noise, you'll see an entirely different side of the author here.

Of course, it couldn't have happened without the novels that came before. DeLillo writes about poverty, consumerism, mass media, fear of death, conspiracies, strained sexual relationships, crowd psychology, history, language, and everything else he'd done before, but here he weaves it all together into a dense and beautiful tapestry. The use and weaving of these diverse themes, coupled with the novel's unique structure - it starts in the '50s, shoots forward into the '90s, digs decade by decade back into the '50s, and then leaps forty years into the future for its grand conclusion, thus creating an excavation for history - make it a novel like none other before it. This means that, while it occasionally overreaches, the overreaching can be forgiven: since DeLillo's working without a net, it's inevitable and acceptable that he sometimes runs ahead of himself. Besides, who wants to read authors that sit around in their own little bubbles all day?

Underworld is a big, bold, astonishing and challenging work, one that asks a lot from you and rewards the patient reader. In love with history and language, it's a novel of ideas that tells a hell of a story, a story much broader than you might expect it to be. Definitely one of the preeminent works of twentieth century fiction.

Sono stato combattuto tra il dargli una sufficienza e il bocciarlo, questo libro.
Gli aspetti positivi del libro sono sicuramente la prosa (e non scopro niente, qui) e certe sue parti, quando una rapida alternanza dei punti di vista comunque in qualche modo collegati tra loro dà l'idea di una trama che si annidi nel testo, e dona un bel caleidoscopio di istantanee di vite.

Il problema a mio avviso è tutto il resto.
La trama che a essere generosi è labile e impalpabile, più bella nella quarta di copertina che non nella sua esecuzione; l'altra trama, quella del protagonista, che perde presto interesse.
Tante storie e tante scene che alla fine durano troppo e risultano pesanti, noiose.


Una mescolanza di cose interessanti e cose noiose, ma alla fine il sentimento che ha prevalso per quanto mi riguarda durante la lettura è stata la noia, la stanchezza, l'attesa spasmodica di arrivare alla fine di un libro che solo a tratti mi ha catturato e che non mi ha mai preso realmente.
Peccato.

Mind duly blown. Nothing this big could ever be without its imperfections -- or absorbed fully, really completed, on a first reading (and, in this case, probably never; new discoveries would likely await on a 100th reading, should anyone get that far). It's a dense, supple nesting of Borgesian labyrinths, encompassing an outsized cosmology that should be far too big for one novel by one writer. But it fully earns its chutzpah and appears not only to warrant, but to demand, its (over)reach. I'm convinced it is worth every byway, every short-circuited connection enfolded within its multitudes. Not the most Perfect, but most likely the Greatest, novel I've read in a very long time.

I totally fail to see what makes Don DeLillo such a great writer and why people are all over this novel. It's that obnoxious Pynchon/Wallace type of post-modern fiction where all the emphasis is placed on novelty and not enough on the fundamentals of good writing. The prose is mediocre, the dialogue is wooden and the characterization is TERRIBLE. 800 effing pages and I still have no clue who any of these characters are, none of them have even the slightest sense of realness. But the plots intertwine and it's really long and I guess that's what passes for a good novel in people's minds.

Umfang und Gesamtkonzeption sind eigentlich gleichbedeutend mit einer Nötigung zu fünf Sternen, erst recht, wenn man den Zeit- und Leseaufwand beim Aufspüren von sinnstiftenden Zusammenhängen in Rechnung stellt, die über das komplette Riesenwerk verstreut sind und dem Leser hin und wieder Finderglücksgefühle vermitteln. Meistens dann, wenn der Sinn des Weiterlesens mal wieder ernsthaft in Frage gestellt wird. Das Vergnügen während der Lektüre streift aber öfter mal den Ein-Sternebereich, gerade im zweiten und im vierten Teil. Von daher vier Sterne, ausführliche Rezi nach ausgiebiger Verdauungspause.