Underworld

By: Don DeLillo

Narrated by: Richard Poe

Length: 31 hrs and 22 mins

Publisher's summary

Our lives, our half century.

Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

Don DeLillo's mesmerizing 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. Lennny 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 connectecd 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. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times - Don DeLillo's greatest and most powerful work of fiction.

©1997 Don DeLillo (P)2011 Simon & Schuster

Critic reviews

" Underworld is a page-turner and a masterwork, a sublime novel and a delight to read." ( The Baltimore Sun)

There's pleasure on evey page of this pitch-perfect evocation of a half-century." ( Newsweek)

"Masterpieces teach you how to read them, and Underworld is no exception." ( The Seattle Times)

I love this audiobook

This is probably my favorite audiobook. DeLillo's gift for language is truly special, and nobody writes like he does in this book, which has an almost jazz-like quality. On a sentence by sentence level, reading (or listening) to this book is a pleasure. The story is absorbing at times, and it's engaging to piece together the ways the various characters are connected to each other--but really it's not about the story. It's about following some characters through the second half of the 20th century, getting hyper-convincing, often moving peaks into their lives and characers, and hearing, through them, some fascinating and moving reflections on a huge variety of important topics. Richard Poe reads this superb writing beautifully, and his performance of this book made him my absolute favorite narrator.

I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys literary fiction. It's unforgettable.

They don’t make them like this anymore… and maybe that’s a good thing.

This is a sprawling epic. Maybe meant to be a masterpiece or maybe just ended up that way. The timeline is erratic and the connections, sometimes that only barely or superficially exist, are not always obvious and sometimes not very meaningful. The voice is very 20th century male macho. Hemingway vs Updike in dialing lingo of lost youth and the futility of admitting your futility. It feels there is a lot of autobiographical scaffolding underneath the prose. So many great lines… of both narrative and story. Not for the timid or easily intimidated. I read this in my 20s but listening to it in my late 40s I seemed to have FELT it more. Probably not for everyone, but then again, is there anything worth experiencing that is built for everyone?

I loved it.

What did you love best about Underworld?

I loved this complex interwoven story; the well developed charaters and how real life and all its strangeness is captured. It's a portrait painted with words. The narrator's voice suits the material perfectly.

Elegy for Left Hand Alone (Title of Part 2)

[*4.5 stars*]

I just finished what to me is likely the most far-reaching American novel in terms of its scope, spanning the 1950s through the 1990s and covering a wide range of American topics, from baseball to solid waste disposal, U.S. nuclear weapons and the Soviet atomic weapons program (i.e., nuclear proliferation), guns, graffiti, the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, the Cuban Missile Crisis, drug addiction, AIDS, marital infidelity, and pulling in a litany of American legends like Lenny Bruce, J. Edgar Hoover and Frank Sinatra.

The novel opens with a lengthy prologue (perhaps the longest I've read) set primarily on October 3, 1951 at the New York Giants' home field, the Upper Manhattan Polo Grounds in a renowned game with the Brooklyn Dodgers to decide the National League pennant winner to play in the World Series. In the bottom of the 9th inning, the Dodgers were up 4-2, and two men were on base when a player named Bobby Thomson stepped up to the plate and hit a 3-run walk-off (game ending) homerun to give the Giants the win 5-4.

The homer has gained a sort of mythical status among baseball fans (such as myself), known as "The Shot Heard 'Round the World." The whereabouts of that baseball is still unknown in real life. But DeLillo creates a young fellow who skipped school and sneaked into the game and a scenario in which this student named Cotter Martin is befriended by an older man and we follow their conversation through parts of the game. The homer is initially caught by the older guy and Cotter wrests the ball away from him and runs home. Yet his father, a drunk, takes the ball out of his room as Cotter sleeps and sells it for $32.45.

The remainder of the book follows a very nonlinear narrative, mostly about a guy named Nick Shay who is an executive VP at a waste disposal company. Shay grew up in Brooklyn. And his life is slowly unfolded, where we learn that he shot a guy when he was a juvenile, around the same time as he was having an affair with a 30-something married woman. DeLillo writes as if he's a bit repressed when it comes to carnal relations. Nick messes around on his wife and his best friend/co-worker is having an affair with Nick's wife.

While Nick is the novel's centerpiece, DeLillo blends in a number of themes (some of which are listed above) and integrates a mosaic of memorable luminaries, the primary two being Hoover and Bruce. Several times, he goes to bits of Bruce's routines in the early 1960s slamming and riffing on the Cuban Missile crisis and nuclear proliferation. Part of Lenny Bruce's routine discussing a guy (generally speaking) on a date :

"you're thinking all the universal things men have always thought about and said to each other, get in her pants? did you get in? did you get some? did you make it? how far'd you get? how far'd she go? is she an easy lay? is she a good hump? is she a piece? did you get a piece? it's like the language of yard goods, piece goods, you can make her, she can be made, it's like a garment factory, ... he's a makeout artist, she's a piece, ....[**]


The Underworld Hoover likes sneaking little peaks at his right-hand man showering and changing.

The titles of most of the parts are quite memorable, including the DuPont ad slogan, "Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry," and the song titles, "Long Tall Sally," by Little Richard, and an infamous Rolling Stones song, not released on any album, called "Cocksucker Blues." The title of the prologue was "The Triumph of Death," a 16th Century oil painting by Dutch artist Pieter Brugel the Elder.


I don't know if I subscribe to this being "The Great American Novel," as a couple of critics have claimed, yet I don't think it's too far off, with such a clever and cunning layout to the book, an intelligent treatment of a number of American themes, drawing in a number of known characters, and its imaginative breadth. My only complaints were that the nonlinear narrative is a little hard to follow and the dialogue of what seems to be a conversation in which two people are talking but it sure doesn't seem like they're conversing with each other, which gets on my nerves.


_________________________

**-- I'll admit I heard this type of banter in college, and will further plead no contest to having said at least one of these things to close friends when I was fourteen and didn't even know what a piece was [seriously, but realize that I was 14 in 1979]. Yet, I can swear that in my numerous years in grade school locker rooms or in a group of beer-fueled college buddies swapping juvenile tales, I never once heard a guy say that he grabbed a girl by her crotch or her breast. Never. At 14, in 1979, I knew better than to ever touch a girl there or there.

Nonetheless, we have a man one step away from being elected POTUS who thought he was entitled to do that, in his late 50s, in the aughts. Or, at the least, joked about doing that? Wow. SMH. Where are the social conservatives, those who argue for censorship in schools to protect kids from smut? Shouldn't they be raising a ruckus? No, they are too busy trying to sell BS from Trump about how 9 women, each and every one of them, are lying and how SNL is part of a grand conspiracy to steal the election from a brazen, irreligious New Yorker. Hypocrisy? Absurdity? Grotesquery? A sign that the apocalypse is upon us?

Epic... time sprawling

A huge story in scope as well as its telling. Linking so many lives, people and events across decades. He keeps you guessing at every turn, quite a creation.

Lost track of the characters. Quit after one-third

What did you like best about Underworld? What did you like least?

The opening chapter (about 2-3 hours) was good. The segments switch points of view and its not obvious right away how the characters are related.

What did you like best about this story?

The opening chapter (about 2-3 hours) was good

What does Richard Poe bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I like his voice and the drama in his reading

Was Underworld worth the listening time?

Didn't finish it. Shame it was two credits

Really wanted to like this book... but no.

I loved the opening scene of the book and the overarching concept of that fateful event pulling several seemingly unrelated characters into a single story. DiLillo is a gifted writer, the descriptions and dialogue were really exceptional well crafted. Some sections were works of art in themselves.

I just couldn’t get past the structure of the writing - too much jumping from time to time and place to place with virtually no continuity between the sub-plots, and very little plot flow. I got almost halfway through it and couldn’t determine what the story was actually about. It’s possible that I could have finished a print version of the book, but the audio format didn’t work for me. Maybe I’ll buy a paper copy and see if it is more palatable.

The narrator was excellent, his gritty voice characterization perfectly matched to overall tone of the novel.

Amazing

Such a great book. I listened to the audiobook while reading it. Can’t wait for more DeLillo.

CYBEX burned into my eyes

The word "CYBEX" burned into my eyes while listening to this book on the treadmill at my local "Y" because I had to intensely concentrate so that I did not miss a single sentence. This is not your usual novel - it does not have a conventional beginning, middle or end. The book starts off describing the playoff game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers for the 1951 National League pennant in which Bobby Thomson hit a three-run home run known as "the shot heard round the world". This section is priceless - the best part of the book, in my opinion. I felt like I was in the thick of the game with the various spectators, famous and not. Even though I knew the outcome of the game before listening to the narration, I was in complete suspense.

After this long section, the rest of the book skips through time, examining portions of the lives of people who were peripherally affected by this event. The next section of the book is a long first-person narrative from the point of view of Nick, a sanitation engineer, who owns the Bobby Thomson home run ball and is in the Arizona desert sometime in the late 1980's or early 1990's viewing an art installation by a woman who it seems he had some sort of involvement with years before (you will find out later - no spoiler alerts here!). We meet J. Edgar Hoover, Lenny Bruce and various other people, both fictional and "non".

And so it goes. The novel jumps back and forth, from the mid 1980's to the early 1990's, then to the summer of 1974, then to the 1960's and back to the period of time immediately before and after the historic 1951 baseball game. Not only do we view the lives of various people during these periods of time, but we also get a cultural snapshots of what was going on during these times. Some of the characters appear and reappear during these times. It is up to you, the listener, to put these narratives together.

Some listeners may be very disconcerted by this jumping around, and may not like putting various pieces of information together, but I found it fascinating. If, however, you want a conventional story, you only need to listen to the first part of the book describing the playoff game. It stands alone, and there is no need to listen to the rest of the book unless you want to.

I found Richard Poe to be a superb narrator - he took paced the narration very well, taking his time with the exquisite phrasing, and gave good voice to all the characters.

I only gave the novel 4 stars because I felt that DeLillo introduced too may "characters" that did not have much to do with the story. I also felt that he left a few loose ends. For instance, the home run ball was eventually caught by a black boy who snuck into the game. I was wondering what ever happened to him, but never found out. There were a few other instance of this.

In short, if you decide to listen to this book, you are in for a unique, fascinating, but possibly frustrating experience.

DeLillo is a master of description

I regularly had to stop admiring DeLillo's storytelling skills in order to absorb the novel's content.