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: #20126 in Books
• Published on: 1998-12-13
• Original language: English
• 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

Masterful
Every now and again, you pick up a book by an author you haven't read before and within 100 pages or so, you know that you'll be seeking out all their other books when you finish this one.
This happened to me with Philip Roth, Iain Banks, Michael Chabon and it had just happened with Don DeLillo.
This is not an 'easy read' but it will richly reward those who stick with it. DeLillo's prose flows so beautifully as to actually relax you as you read, creating a complex and colourful world.
This is among the most successful uses of the time-travelling narrative I have come across, it feels natural to the flow of the story and never feels like a gimmick.
The baseball thread throughout ties things together beautifully although I would recommend non-US citizens spend 2 minutes reading about 'The shot heard round the world' so that they realise the significance of the opening chapter.
Highly recommended.

Blown Away
The opening chapter blows (you) away. Published three years before 9-11, this is a riveting multi-focal account of a baseball game incorporating historical and fictional characters, which climaxes with thousands of pieces of paper floating down from the stands and characters hanging from walls before falling to earth as they drop to invade the pitch. Creepily prescient for a "Great American Novel" about the Cold War and after.

The next section cuts promisingly to the desert and a modern artistic community painting B52s in dry storage, observed from a hot-air balloon. A cast of believable characters emerges, the dialogue is sharp and the scenes visualise well but then what else? Loads of men beefing and joking about this and that; 'under'-themes of conspiracies and waste (garbage managers, sewage, radioactive deserts); women who enter in order to generate a little desultory adultery.

This is a man's world and a man's book written as a literary giant killer (the anxiety of influence for the author; the anxiety of not having read the new Ulysses for the reader).

After 300 (/800) pages of great writing but little sign of a plot, I just stopped. So I'd agree with Mr B.

Mindblowingly awful
Heres's the easy bit. It cost me £2 from Oxfam.
Here's the hard bit. Trying to convey how simply awful this "tour de force is".
You know the old adage.."Difficult to read....etc"? Well, this really was a struggle to achieve the 200 odd pages before I decided that I'd get more satisfaction out of de-fleaing the dog.

Storyline...I still have no idea what the inane ramblings were supposed to be saying. You read a paragraph, then spend 5 minutes trying to work out
a) Who he is talking about
b) What he is talking about
c) What relevance this has at all to do with the story
d) Why bother with this any longer

The writing...Now I'm no writer (certainly not one that can produce a worthy prose as you have already seen), but the grammar here is simply diabolical. Endless (and I really do mean), endless sentences strung together by miriads of commas- whole paragraphs! Oh yeh. The "modern American writer". That means endless drivel.

Congratulations to anyone who has managed to finish this epic. Because you are either numb to the core by now, or verging on insanity.


I'd give this a zero. But there's no "zero" option,and its a nice cover picture, so I'll give it a 1. And a short throw to the bin. Utter garbage