Ah, our sad spinning globe...worn ragged by wars, bruised and dirtied by technology. Don DeLillo grabs it, still spinning, on its flight of October 3, 1951. Grips it like a knuckleball pitcher. One fingernail dug firmly into the historic Giants-Dodgers playoff game. Another nail dug into the first successful Soviet A-Bomb test. He holds the orb up, examines it like Lenny Bruce pondering a rap, and lets fly a granddaddy of all butterfly pitches.

Swing. Try and connect with it if you can. You're sure to get a piece. Whistling vortexes grabbing at this globe's seams. It ducks towards the life of Nick Shay, son of a small time bookie, who is trying to deal with his father's disappearance. It dodges toward Klara Sax, a woman struggling to find her identity as an artist. It hops around Nick's family and neighborhood, and dashes into the future, and the past. And when you swing at it, it turns into the smiling face of Lenny Bruce, shrieking "We're all gonna die" and then into the Mona Lisa smile of an obscure junkie, who IS about to die. And, oh, it turns into Bobby Thomson's home run ball, bouncing through bleacher seats, about to change into a holy grail, provenance unkown.

The novel's structure is like a shuffled deck made of cards from its characters lives. The narrative, at one point, swirls past that famous monument to found art - the Watts Tower and takes on its magic, dazzling the reader as bits and pieces of multiple characters' pasts and futures come together and suggest grander themes concerning ...the environment? ...capitalism?...the human comedy?

The best parts of Underworld (the very best were the Lenny Bruce monologues) reminded me of the lyricism of The Great Gatsby and On the Road. Boats being beat back by the current; the land stretching away beyond New Jersey... and God as Pooh Bear.

Our earth, the paradox, still spinning, still circling and yet - and it takes an artist like DeLillo to tell this part - "Going... going...gone!" ( )

The book goes up and down. There'll be fifty pages without much and then a sudden swarm of insights. Typical Delillo weaknesses in narration; too obvious here, eye-rolling overwrought there. Some parts don't fit into the whole (wtf was that bit about the highway killer, totally gets lost in the last 300 pages) but overall I gotta give it top rating cuz A) great themes (waste management, cold war, I like Nick Shay's character) B) the epilogue is titled "Das Kapital" and C) the last sentence is "Peace." which is how I end all my emails, so that was weird to see in print. Maybe the best last word, up there with "yes" from Ulysses and "the" from Finnegan's Wake.I would say it's the least of the modern epics I've read so far, i.e. not as good as Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow, or JR. ( )

The depiction of all of the different times and places (including various scenes in New York City) within the later half of twentieth century America are all very sharp, distinct, and vivid.
I have read this novel twice so far, but I would have to read it many more times to understand the rich layers of symbolism. Fortunately, it is so fascinating that I look forward to such a process. ( )

The bomb, the baseball, and wasteland America.: Nominated for the National Book Award, Don DeLillo's ambitious 1997 historical novel tells the story of Nick Shay, a Phoenix waste management executive, who lives a meaningless life in late 20th Century America, a land of ever-accumulating garbage. (Phoenix becomes a microcosm of existential angst and wasteland America.) His wife, Marian, is having an affair with one of his friends. The novel spans five decades of American history, from the 1950s through the 1990s, opening on October 3, 1951, when a young man named Cotter Martin catches a ball known as "The Shot Heard 'Round the World," after sneaking into a New York Giants-Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game. Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, and Lenny Bruce are also in attendance. As Bobby Thomson was hitting his pennant-winning home run, the Soviets were meanwhile detonating the atomic bomb that put 1950s America in fear of nuclear war. When the story then turns to two lovers in the Nevada desert in 1992, we learn that Shay (who now owns the baseball) served time in a juvenile detention center for murdering a man, before attending a Jesuit reform school in northern Minnesota. Underworld is fascinating look at the effect of the Cold War on the American psyche. It reveals the author of [[ASIN:0140283307 White Noise]] at the top of his form, and DeLillo's brilliant vision of American culture left me in awe.

G. Merritt

* NO Spoilers were used in the writing of this review! *

These are 827 pages that I never wanted to end.
The gorgeous writing and kaleidoscope of ideas seem like a revelation.

I now - unwillingly - compare all other books to this one.
It saddens me that Underworld appears to be under appreciated... ( )