There is an important reason why Underworld is written from future to past. The artist in the desert, painting a deactivated aircraft from the cold war times, is trying to process the past from a nation that is lost to time. Such an understanding must arise from the creation of meaning to fill in the gaps, as she does with the pin-up girl left as a souvenir in the B-52. What she tries to process is as much the story of a nation in the uncertain limbo between the ending of an era and the start of a new one, where things just do not seem real, as she remarks, as it is about herself, and a past that cannot be recalled, even if it made her as she is today, as well as the man who comes searching for it in her in 1992.

History can only be understood by walking backwards in time. What explains each scar is a story that is not told upright, but hidden in between every line. Underworld follows DeLillo's usual tropes of dialogue, where everything that's important is everything that is not mentioned. It's just not possible to understand the paranoia of nuclear threat, you have to live under it. Yet this is what we try, to make sense of everything that's happening. This is why the story is told backwards: the reason behind every event lies in something happening just before that. Underworld is a story about a nation just how it is about each one of its inhabitants.

That's why I find this book so incredibly dense and hard to read. Every part has enough content to be a standalone book, but every line is meaningless if not attached to a before and after. Such complex relationships are multisided, revealing something that does not concern only those immediately involved. That's why Nick Shay is allowed to hold the ball from the shot heard round the world, and to claim it is a symbol of defeat. ( )

Disclaimer: It is entirely possible I did not understand this book at all and what follows is meaningless babble.

Of all the books I have ever read I believe Underworld might be the hardest to review. Not because of the star rating. That is a 5 without question. The writing here is dazzling. This is historical fiction deconstructed, reconstructed, and then thrown into a supercharged industrial blender and shot out into the cosmos. Our “hero” works in “waste management” and a recurring theme here is the creative ways we prettify the fact of our waste products, from actual shit to plutonium waste, helping us to ignore the fact that all this waste, submerged or made into building materials or buried, or whatever, is destroying the planet. The parallel between the way in which DeLillo treats historical fiction (and the way he treats history for that matter) and the waste management sleight of hand is a terrifying yet fun way to render evil genius. He turns the metaphors used by marketers to make the most pernicious toxic things seem like gifts to the world into a metaphor for humans creating a glossy version of the past and future they can live with. He uses a central metaphor as a second central metaphor. It is breathtaking.

DeLillo seems to repudiate nostalgia here (a concept I wholeheartedly embrace.) The past is special because we want it to be special. We create false memories and expunge anything problematic. The value of memory is no more than mass delusion. “Every memory we have is, finally, of ourselves. If the memory of an experience is flawed, there is a rift in the continuity of self.” We are fiddling with the past, creating a good-ol-days myth in order to get a hit of dopamine and forget we are inexorably moving toward an end we ourselves have ordained. The past is filled with as much or more evil than the present but people agree to apply and validate the nostalgia filter because mass delusion gives us succor and hope in a harsh and hopeless world. That nostalgia filter is no different from the delusions of people who see statues of the Virgin Mary weep or the face of Jesus in a water stain on a building, just a delusion born of privilege rather than want.

Despite Underworld's brilliance as a whole, and maybe because there is no plot (as there is no plot in life) sometimes the whole thing seems to kind of fall apart. There are lulls – long lulls that left me pretty disconnected from the rest of the story. But, though it wanders off frequently, the book comes charging back every time to this concept of life and memory as a euphemism, like Glenn Close popping up spring-loaded in Michael Douglas’ tub. When I was poking around trying to pump myself up to read this book, I came across a quote from Martin Amis’ review of this book that really sums things up: “Underworld may or may not be a great novel, but there is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great novelist.” Those lulls are problematic, but they are the packaging for utter brilliance.

Lenny Bruce comes up a lot in this book. He is not simply mentioned. DeLillo recreates several Bruce performances while tunneling into Bruce’s brilliant, tragic, overfilled head. While this is well done I started wondering a bit past the halfway point why Don kept doing this and why he kept focusing on the way Bruce ping-ponged between funny traditionally structured bawdy insightful jokes and profound, decidedly unfunny, observations about human cruelty and idiocy and brilliance, and the inevitability that those things will drive us to destroy ourselves (Bruce’s tagline, “we’re all gonna diiiiiiiiiiiiie,” is the chorus here.) At first it was easy to connect Bruce’s routines to the specter of nuclear annihilation. After wondering about that for a while I realized that DeLillo had coopted Bruce’s structure for this book. He intersperses incredibly funny and traditionally structured scenes with profound, decidedly unfunny observations about human cruelty and idiocy, and brilliance, and the inevitability that those things will drive us to destroy ourselves. I think DeLillo uses some of the lulls the same way as the humor. All of it wraps up profound truth, Delillo is a modern-day Lenny who understands you can't keep an audience with a spare recitation of terrifying truth.

A couple of random notes on things that really impressed me. First, while parts of this book are firmly rooted in the language and thought processes of the 60’s. 70’s and 80’s DeLillo was disturbingly prescient, and much of this feels very current. He saw the danger of things that have now come to roost but which when this was written most just saw as progress. Second, the book launches with what could easily have been published as a free-standing novella set at one of the most famous baseball game moments ever (Bobby Thomson’s walk-off home run in the 1951 National League Dodgers- Giants pennant game a/k/a “the shot heard round the world.”) This opening novella stands as one of the finest pieces of writing I have ever read. Even if you decide not to invest in this giant book, 827 pages that require complete mental focus pretty much all the time, you should read the first part. You should bear in mind though that the epilogue is a response of sorts to that opening bit of nostalgia. The ending also, it gives us some closure on the baseball which is hit in the opening and sails through these pages. Never has a baseball worked this hard, but though dinged up it manages to knit the book together.

I will shut up now and hope at least a couple of people will be inspired to take on this boulder of a book.

*This book weighs about 10 pounds. It is not totable so I got the audio to listen to on the subway, and I read the hardcover at home. The audio was enjoyable so I don't not recommend it, but this is a book you want to read in print. When I listened on the train and got home and picked up the book it felt like I had never seen/heard the portions I listened too. I couldn't figure out where I was. Nearly every time I listened I ended up going back and reading the text. ( )

The USSR should have won the Cold War ( )

I actually miss this monster of a book. I have a lot of complicated feelings about it that I may never work through completely. ( )

Reason read: 1001 Books, 2nd Quarter read, Reading 1001. ROOT (read our own tomes). The story is historical fiction, a postmodern novel that is set in the period of the fifties and sixties. The book opens with the baseball pennant race of 1951. What's not more American than baseball. Themes include; nuclear proliferation, waste, and everything else that epitomizes the 50s and 60s. DeLillo weaves the reality with the fiction throughout the book.

The novel was published in 1997 and received a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize and won the American Book Award. It is set in the US states of New York, Nevada, Arizona, Texas and perhaps others I haven't gotten to yet. I will add that Minnesota was also mentioned as Nick spent his juvenile detention years in northeast Minnesota (my home town area). Also mentioned is Kazakhstan which is interesting fact because I just bought Soveitistan by Erika Fatland which covers all the 'stans'. It mentions that nuclear testing occurred here. And it mentions that people die young and die of cancer.

The book probably is his best but I like Libra better, the difference might be the sprawling length of Underworld. Libra focuses only on Kennedy assassination while this book focuses on everything. I liked that it starts with the baseball game and the missing home run ball is the piece that connects the many people and points of the novel.
Rating 3.9 stars ( )