Editors Reads Verdict
A vast, architecturally daring novel that traces five decades of American life through objects, images, and coincidences — DeLillo's most ambitious work and a genuine masterpiece of postwar American fiction.
What We Loved
- The opening prologue — the 1951 Polo Grounds game — is among the greatest set-pieces in American fiction
- The reverse chronological structure creates a sustained sense of revelation and inevitability
- DeLillo's range across class, geography, and history is unmatched in contemporary American fiction
Minor Drawbacks
- At 827 pages, it demands significant commitment and rewards patience more than momentum
- The deliberately fragmented structure can frustrate readers who want linear narrative drive
Key Takeaways
- → The Cold War shaped American culture in ways that persisted long after the Soviet Union dissolved
- → Waste — material and psychological — is the hidden connecting tissue of postwar American life
- → The same object can carry entirely different meanings depending on who possesses it and when
- → History moves backward as well as forward — the novel's reverse chronology enacts this formally
| Author | Don DeLillo |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Scribner |
| Pages | 827 |
| Published | October 3, 1997 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, American Literature, Postmodern Fiction |
Underworld Review
Don DeLillo spent years writing Underworld, and the novel announces its ambitions immediately: the opening prologue, “The Triumph of Death,” reconstructs the 1951 National League playoff game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers — Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world” — as a simultaneous event with the Soviet Union’s second nuclear test. DeLillo puts J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, and Toots Shor in the Polo Grounds stands and has Hoover receive news of the Soviet test as the home run ball sails into the crowd. It is an audacious, almost scandalous piece of fiction, and it earns every page of what follows.
The novel’s central conceit — tracking the fate of that baseball through fifty years of American history — is, appropriately for DeLillo, less a plot than a formal principle. We follow the ball backwards: from the 1990s back toward 1951. The primary protagonist is Nick Shay, a waste management executive from the Bronx who has acquired the ball and carries it as a talisman of something he cannot quite name. Around Nick, DeLillo assembles a vast cast: his wife Marian, the artist Klara Sax (who paints decommissioned B-52 bombers in the Arizona desert), Lenny Bruce, Sister Edgar, a Texas Highway Killer, a graffiti artist in the South Bronx. The connections between these figures are sometimes direct, sometimes purely atmospheric — DeLillo is interested in the culture’s connective tissue, not its foreground narrative.
What DeLillo is tracking is nothing less than the inner life of postwar America: the way nuclear anxiety warped ordinary existence, the way waste — garbage, toxic material, discarded things — became the hidden substrate of consumer culture, the way images circulated and accumulated meaning across decades. The novel’s famous meditation on a Bruegel painting, “The Triumph of Death,” which Hoover studies as the game progresses, gives the book its title and its deepest theme: that beneath the surfaces of ordinary American life lies something vast and dark and not easily named.
Underworld is not a comfortable read. Its 827 pages contain long stretches of ruminative prose, sections where DeLillo seems more interested in sustaining a particular tone than in advancing any recognizable narrative. But this is, in a sense, the point — the novel’s form enacts its content. American life in the Cold War era was not experienced as a coherent narrative but as an accumulation of disconnected images and events, held together by fear and by the shared knowledge that everything might end at any moment. DeLillo’s formal experiment is his most honest response to that condition.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Underworld" about?
DeLillo's masterwork begins with a legendary 1951 baseball game between the Giants and the Dodgers — the 'shot heard round the world' — and traces the fate of the ball hit for the home run through fifty years of American history: the Cold War, nuclear anxiety, the waste stream, art, crime, and the interconnected lives of ordinary Americans. It is the great American novel of the second half of the twentieth century.
What are the key takeaways from "Underworld"?
The Cold War shaped American culture in ways that persisted long after the Soviet Union dissolved Waste — material and psychological — is the hidden connecting tissue of postwar American life The same object can carry entirely different meanings depending on who possesses it and when History moves backward as well as forward — the novel's reverse chronology enacts this formally
Is "Underworld" worth reading?
A vast, architecturally daring novel that traces five decades of American life through objects, images, and coincidences — DeLillo's most ambitious work and a genuine masterpiece of postwar American fiction.
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