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)

one of the greatest novels ever. the nyc bible

best delillo book i've read. prophetic and sublime, the books captures urban life like nothing else.

Will be looked at as a classic in time

What made the experience of listening to Underworld the most enjoyable?

Great story with an excellent reader. DeLillo takes a simple concept (in the path taken by the Bobby Thompson home run ball) and twists into an incredibly detailed and interesting story about the many lives the ball affected in the subsequent years.

What did you like best about this story?

It engaged me from the beginning. DeLillo is a great author and knows what it takes to write a captivating story with many hidden meanings that I'm sure will be debated for years to come.

Have you listened to any of Richard Poe’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

N/A

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Not one particular moment. The way the author creates an intersection of each characters life is captivating on its' own.

Hallucinating author

Beautiful writing with interesting insights. Multiple storylines the don’t really add up to any coherent conclusion. Y’all either find it mindbending or completely ridiculous.

I didn’t want it to end.

I went into this book knowing absolutely nothing about the plot. I encourage you to do the same.

A masterwork of lyrical yet cynical characters.

I already know I’ll read this again. A Truly deep and idiosyncratic world fleshed out superbly in ascending levels of human conversation .

Depressing, asymmetrical, overwrought. A masterpiece.

This book, however stilted and disagreeable, is one of the most thorough anthropological statements about the 20th century there could ever be.

Underworld epic

I read this book when it first came out expecting a gangster tale. I was surprised at the book I read. Listening to it years later reminded me why I consider it a favorite .

"How rare it was to see what it was before you"

Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997) is a large sprawling novel tightly focused around a set of intertwining themes about waste, weapons, memory, language, perception, relationships, life, and death. It's set mostly during and after the Cold War in America, especially NYC. The tone, style, and concerns of the novel are established by the Prologue, a tour de force account of the deciding game of the 1951 pennant playoff between the NY Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, won by the Giants on the legendary sayonara homerun hit by Bobby Thomson off Ralph Branca, immediately being named "the shot heard round the world" while occurring at about the same time as a Soviet atomic bomb test. DeLillo writes the points of view of various people, e.g., Cotter Martin, the young black teen who flamboyantly sneaks into the game; Russ Hodges, the Giants announcer who enters baseball lore in calling the homerun; J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director who is attending the game with Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason; and Nick Shay, teen Dodgers fan who is devastated after listening to the game on his radio on the roof of his Bronx apartment building.

The novel itself opens in 1992 with 57-year old Nick driving through the desert to see Klara Sax, a famous 72-year old cast off object artist working on an epic project involving 230 retired Cold War B-52s. Forty years ago, it develops, Nick had a brief affair with Klara when she was married to his science teacher who was also his little brother's chess mentor. Now Nick works for a big waste management firm headquartered in a bronze tower in Phoenix and often feels unreal.

Although Nick is the protagonist of the novel (his is the only first person narration), DeLillo inhabits an impressive variety of characters at different stages in their lives, among them Nick's wife Marian (trying to make a self while married to a "demon husband"), his mother Rosemary (supporting her sons by herself), his brother Matt (deciding to quit doing bomb risk analysis work), Manx Martin (comically attempting to sell the Thomson homerun baseball), Marvin Lundy (epically searching for it), Klara Sax (enjoying life in NYC as an artist), her first husband Albert Bronzini (walking musing and schmoozing about the Bronx), J. Edgar Hoover and his aide/companion Clyde "Junior" Tolson (safeguarding the nation against "insurgents" of every stripe), Sister Edgar (doing good works with extreme cleanliness), stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce (riffing on the Cuban Missile Crisis), advertising account exec Charles Wainright (firing people and dispensing wisdom like "whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world"), his failure son Chuckie (on another bombing mission over Vietnam). The many point of view characters reveal how different people perceive and construct the world, life, and meaning: young and old, male and female, white and black, anointed and powerless, heroes and goats, believers and faithless, educated and ignorant, artists and scientists, marketers and consumers, entertainers and audiences, parents and children, siblings and friends, spouses and adulterers, geniuses and fools. . . Humanity in all its permutations.

Each short story-like chapter interweaves vignettes from the 1950s, 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s, and 90s. Even as DeLillo captures Cold War and post-Cold War American culture in appalling and hilarious detail, he universalizes his novel by linking 20th-century USA and Bruegel's The Triumph of Death. That's why he writes so many scenes at shows, parties, baseball games, demonstrations, etc. until even "private" scenes between lovers seem to occur in a crowd. But although the novel references Bruegel's painting and Pluto's Hades and sets Lenny Bruce to crying, "We're all gonna die!" and deals with war, Plutonium, murder, disease, aging, dying, and so on, it also shows how people create, educate, learn, love, see, remember, joke, communicate, know, and believe in that context. And it ends with a paean to peace.

The book is fresh and vivid in its depiction of the world, apt for a novel about looking carefully and bravely. For DeLillo, that kind of seeing is dependent on language: "You didn't see the thing because you don't know how to look and you don't how to look because you don't know the names." Thus Nick seeks the exact names of things, and DeLillo wields language precisely and plays with etymologies.

One thing he wants us to see is "the best kept secret in the world," waste, the origin of civilization, "a religious thing," for "It is necessary to respect what we discard," lest "What we secrete comes back to consume us." Thus Nick and his colleagues believe that "We were the Church Fathers of waste in all its transmutations," while "crafting the future" from "every kind of used and lost and eroded object of desire."

Like waste, weapons "reflect the soul of the maker," and DeLillo is the bard of the bomb: "the spectacle of the unmattered atom, the condensation cloud, arranged split-secondly on the shock disk, sort of primly, place centered, and the visible shock approaching, and the Biblical wind that carries sagebrush, sand, hats, cats, car parts, condoms, and poisonous snakes, all blowing by in the desert dawn."

Yes, the language of Underworld is rich and lyrical and ranges from the numinous to the comedic:

--"He has been to one night game in his life, coming down from the bluff with his oldest brother and walking into a bowl of painted light. He thought there was an unknown energy flaring down out of the light towers, some intenser working of the earth, and it isolated the players and the grass and the chalk-rolled lines from anything he'd ever seen or imagined. They had the glow of first-time things."
--"She had a European accent slashed and burned by long term residency in New York, and her hair had the retouched gloss of a dead crow mounted on a stick."

I love DeLillo's use of -ed to make new adjectives (not unlike Klara making art from B-52s): mermaided, roman-collared, unsheveled, eyelinered, scatterhanded, spindle-shanked, Buddha-headed, etc.

The fine reader of the audiobook, Richard Poe, nails all the nuances and pauses and emphases and accents and clearly relishes reading DeLillo's wonderful prose.

If there is a flaw, it's that after a while the many different lyrical, philosophical, and witty people start sounding like DeLillo. Or that reading the constant rich language becomes like dining only on juicy steak and dark chocolate mousse for a week. But this book is so funny and life-affirming, and is so packed with vivid and original descriptions and metaphors, and has such an ironic and sympathetic eye for human folly and mortality, and hosts such a large and interesting cast of characters, that it seems churlish to pick at such things.

Great Writing

Which scene was your favorite?

The book opens with a lengthy description of the "Shot Heard Round the World," Bobby Thompson's home run that gave the New York Giants the 1951 American League Pennant. This may be some of the best writing in American literature. Seriously.

"What A Long Strange Trip It's Been...."

This was my first engagement with the works of, Don DeLillo. It was at first a challenge to find rhythm but not for long.

DeLillo paints a portrait here more than telling a story. He makes sure the reader/listener is right in the center of each scene from the types of paper floating around in an October ballgame to the night movements and works of a master graffiti artist to the smell and vision of massive waste dumps to the detonation of atomic bombs, you are an insider not a consumer of this masterpiece. You smell, hear, see, feel the sweat, tension, passion, fear and desperation of a nation railing toward collapse.

The writer presents his material as a sociologist, psychologist, cultural anthropologist, artist, conversationalist and certainly as a master of his craft.