Underworld

By: Don DeLillo

Narrated by: Richard Poe

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Finalist for the National Book Award
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner of the Howell’s Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

“A great American novel” (San Francisco Chronicle) that spans five decades of American history, following the intimate lives of the men and women who lived through them.

It begins with a moment of legend: the 1951 baseball game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers in which the winning homerun known as the Shot Heard Round the World coincides with news of the Soviet Union’s first hydrogen bomb test.

The baseball itself, scuffed and passed from hand to hand, becomes the thread that weaves an astonishing tapestry that spans the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam protests, and beyond, telling the story of Nick Shay, Klara Sax, and the hidden histories of a nation both haunted and illuminated by its past.

Sweeping yet intimate, Underworld is an astonishing story of men and women brought together and torn apart against the backdrop of half a century of American history.

Masterful performance of a masterpiece

Underworld is a great book, a sprawling nonlinear narrative encompassing the great themes of the second half of the 20th century in America portrayed in the intimate lives of many characters. I read it when it first came out, and recently decided to listen to it on a long road trip. This performance is mesmerizing, Richard Poe always sounds as though he's speaking the words, not reading them, with variations appropriate to the many different characters. The audio quality on this recording is top notch as well, all around a very well done audiobook, highly recommended!

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?

Great storytelling, fluid prose, snappy dialog

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes. There are many different characters in this long novel and Delillo interweaves their stories brillianly. They keep popping up at unexpected and yet absolutely correct spots in the novel.

I don't know of another writer who writes better dialog than Don Delillo.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Underworld?

As another reviewer noted, the long opening set piece in the Polo Grounds during the final 1951 national league playoff game between the Giants and the Dodgers is truely great writing. Delillo's imagined banter among Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor, who in reality did attend the playoff game together, is very, very funny.

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

There is a great deal of sparkling dialog in the novel and Richard Poe does an excellent job in giving each character his or her own voice. I especially enjoyed his rendering of Marv Lundy, the retired sports memorabilia collector. Almost everying that Marv says sounds off the wall, yet hilarious. You don't get the full effect without Richard Poe's voice inflections.

If you could rename Underworld, what would you call it?

I wouldn't rename it. I like Delillo's metaphor. No matter how deeply you bury nuclear or other toxic waste, eventually some of it is bound to rise to the surface. So too, no matter how far under the surface emotional pain and trauma is buried, it still has a great deal to do with what we do and who we are.

Any additional comments?

This is a great novel with snappy, yet absolutely authentic-sounding dialog.

Complex

I found this novel to be a complex marathon of stories set in the second part of XX Century America. While the tread of the story seems to follow a set of characters, the truth is that there is no single story been narrated but a collection of them. Characters come and go as the book matures and then are lost in the maze of the timeline. I liked the book but I failed to grasp its greatness.