Synopsis
In order to dramatize the theme that all people and events in the universe are connected, DeLillo presents several narrators and a series of chronologically dislocated events. Additionally, history and facts scattered throughout the novel connect the reader to DeLillo's fictional world. After the reader discovers how these disjointed experiences and characters are related, the message of the novel becomes clear. The novel is set in the world of American baseball from the 1950s to the early 1990's. In its famous 1951 opening scene, the Giants win a crucial game against the Dodgers thanks to Bobby Thompson's home run, at the same moment that the Russians successfully test the A-bomb, an event that signals the real beginning of the Cold War. Baseball and international politics drive the narrative, which centers on ex-ballplayer Nick Shay and an artist named Klara Sax, the woman he once loved. UNDERWORLD was nominated for the National Book Award.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1997-10-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 827 pages | | Height: | 10.0 in | | Width: | 6.3 in | | Thickness: | 2.2 in | | Weight: | 44.8 oz |
Publisher's Note
Don DeLillo's novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome - the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World - shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb. The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, generates the narrative that follows. It takes the reader deeply into the lives of Nick and Klara and into modern memory and the soul of American culture - from Bronx tenements to grand ballrooms to a B-52 bombing raid over Vietnam. A generation's master spirits come and go. Lenny Bruce cracking desperate jokes, Mick Jagger with his devil strut, J. Edgar Hoover in a sexy leather mask. And flashing in the margins of ordinary life are the curiously connected materials of the culture. Condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs, and miracle sites on the Web. Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War.
Industry Reviews
"[A]n amazing performance, a novel that encompasses some five decades of history....It is the story of one man, one family, but it is also the story of what happened to America in the second half of the 20th century....Though the novel is laugh-out-loud funny at times, DeLillo's satiric impulse is matched, in these pages, by a new willingness to probe beneath the surface of the characters' lives....Cutting back and forth in time and between a multitude of plot lines, DeLillo creates a wonderfully rich, elliptical narrative....[A] dazzling, phosphorescent work of art."
New York Times - Michiko Kakutani (09/16/1997)
"Working at the top of his form, DeLillo draws on his previous novels 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..."
Covey
"[T]he best English-language novel of the Nineties...."
New York Review of Books - John Leonard (02/22/2001)
"UNDERWORLD may or may not be a great novel, but there is no question that it renders DeLillo a great novelist."
New York Times Book Review - Martin Amis (10/05/1997)
"The novel is an impressive feat of cerebration--a highly wrought and unbelievable theory about garbage and G-men joined to lament for lost community."
Wall Street Journal - James Bowman
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