Underworld - Hardcover

DeLillo, Don

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684842696 ISBN 13: 9780684842691

Publisher: Scribner, 1997

Synopsis

A monumental work combining fiction and history in a collaboration that encompasses fifty years gives readers a glimpse into the realities upon which America's modern culture is based and explores the complex relationship between "waste analyst" Nick Shay and artist Klara Sax. 125,000 first printing. BOMC & QPB Main.

About this title

About the Author

Don DeLillo is the author of eleven novels, including White Noise, Libra, and Mao II. He has won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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. (Film rights to Scott Rudin/Paramount; Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club main selections; author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

On October 3, 1951, there occurred two "shots heard round the world"?Bobby Thomson's last-minute homer, which sent the N.Y. Giants into the World Series, and a Soviet atomic bomb test. The fallout from these two events provides the nexus for this sagalike rumination on the last 50 years of American cultural history. DeLillo's opening depiction of the scene at the N.Y. Polo Grounds that day is masterly. Unfortunately, sustaining the initial brilliance proves difficult. There are some marvelously drawn characters?Sister Edgar, a vision-seeking nun of the old school; Ismael, a ghetto-based graffiti artist and budding capitalist; J. Edgar Hoover?and thought-provoking ideas, e.g., waste as the cornerstone of civilization and the power of remembered images lurking just beneath the surface of our minds. But somehow the various parts of the story seem more satisfying than the whole. DeLillo is one of our most gifted contemporary authors whose works belong in all academic and public libraries, yet one suspects that his truly "great" novel is yet to come.
-?David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

DeLillo always writes large, but here he has reached new dimensions as he taps into all the terrifying and confounding forces unleashed by the inception of the nuclear age. His stylistically magnificent, many-voiced, and soulful novel begins on October 3, 1951, at New York's Polo Grounds, where the decisive game in the race for the pennant between the legendary Giants and Dodgers is taking place, the same day the Soviet Union detonates an atom bomb. It's a spectacular scene, and DeLillo is everywhere: the announcer's booth where Russ Hodges is losing his voice; the stands where a young truant named Cotter is catching his breath after jumping the turnstile; the box seat where J. Edgar Hoover and friends exchange small talk and insults; and on the field, where baseball history is being made, and the unifying symbol of the story, the ball hit into the stands in the game-winning home run, begins its talismanic journey. As DeLillo zooms in on each sphere of action, and each psyche, he achieves an unsurpassed intensity of sensory and psychological detail, which is rendered with exquisite tenderness. He never once loses this quality, this warmth and sorrow, as the narrative sways back and forth in time, and as more and more compelling characters and situations are introduced. There's Nick Shay, a waste-management expert burdened by a violent past; Klara Sax, an artist creating a monumental work in the middle of the desert out of decommissioned B-52s; and incendiary genius Lenny Bruce. Like novelists E. L. Doctorow and Thomas Pynchon, DeLillo uses historical figures to great effect, but DeLillo is a far more emotive and spiritual writer, and Underworld is a ravishingly beautiful symphony of a novel. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684842696
• ISBN 13: 9780684842691
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 827