Product Description

Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious home run that wins the game, the Shot Heard Round the World, shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atom bomb.
The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, generates the narrative that follows. It takes the reader deeply 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 culture: condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs and miracle sites on the Web.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19410 in Books
• Published on: 1998-12-13
• Binding: Paperback
• 832 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the Cold War and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.

"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.

Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled. --Amazon.com

Salman Rushdie
`Underworld is a magnificent book by an American master'

Michael Ondaatje
`This book is an aria and a wolf whistle of our half-century'

Customer Reviews

This book has just about everything
So much of society is condensed in this novel. Just about every sentence dazzles. DeLillo manages to dig deep into our lives and present one of the most staggering works of fiction I've ever read. Non-linear, dense with words that zing off the page, this is worth staying with for the ultimate rewards.

Brave and brilliant...in parts...
If you seek a fast read, don't read this. If you yearn for thrilling adventures, glued to the page, unable to tear your eyes away, then don't read this. If, however, like me, you are sometimes more than happy to be drawn into a rambling saga of life, observations that seem to pinpoint aspects of existence that we are all familiar with, and yet somehow never put our finger on...then perhaps Underworld is for you. This is nothing but a brave book. DeLillo paints a vast canvas, almost a series of images tied together in the loosest way, and yet he does it with such charm, and with such great passages of prose, that it is hard to put it down. I think this book is like Guinness or camembert -an acquired taste, and you either have that taste or you don't. I do, at least in the main, and I savoured the reading of this book over a couple of weeks. Hard-going sometimes, but worth it for the sheer breadth and scope of this epic view of contemporary American life.

Superb!
I last read this 5 years ago, it was a great read and offered a valuable insight to american life in the 20th century. A lot of the imagery contained within this novel is still at the forefont of my mind -it has made a lasting impression, it is rare for a novel to have this effect, especially with the fleeting experience that many modern novels offer these days.

I wont cover the other fantastic aspects of this novel, I am sure they are well documented in other reviews.

I cant wait to pick this book up and read it again!