Underworld (Picador Classic) - Softcover

DeLillo, Don

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1447289390 ISBN 13: 9781447289395

Publisher: Picador, 2015

Synopsis

With an introduction by Rachel Kushner

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

It's a vast and sprawling crowd that comes together to watch the Dodgers-Giants 1951 National League Final, and when Bobby Thomson hits the Shot Heard Round the World and wins the pennant race for the Giants, ripples are formed in the heavy undercurrent of time. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, another historic shot is fired: the USSR's second atomic detonation. And so Underworld follows the threads that link a symphonic cast of characters: men and women, together and apart, whose search for meaning, survival and connection will spill out over decades.

Underworld is Don DeLillo's masterpiece, a novel of intense ambition and soaring architecture, and a panoramic vision of America set against the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is awe-inspiring storytelling and an undisputed modern classic.

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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

Review:

A literary colossus, equal to any (and surpassing most) of the vaulting novels which strive for the immensity of the American mythic. (Geoff Dyer Sunday Telegraph)

A rousingly impressive achievement in almost every novelistic department - dialogue, structure, timing, precise description, heartfelt veracity and the rest. (William Boyd Observer)

Every decade or so the real thing comes along - a work of literature so overwhelmingly good that you know it is a masterpiece which will endure . . . huge sections sweep you along in a way that only the greatest books can. (Michael Shelden Daily Telegraph)

His longest, most ambitious, and most complicated novel - and his best . . . Underworld is the black comedy of the Cold War; it is full of sentences that capture, with the choice of the odd word, a moment in American history. (New Yorker)

Astonishing . . . an amazing performance . . . Mr DeLillo's most affecting novel yet . . . This bravura master of cerebral pyrotechnics also knows how to seize and rattle our emotions . . . In this remarkable novel, [DeLillo] has taken the effluvia of modern society, all the detritus of our daily and political lives, and turned it into a dazzling, phosphorescent work of art. (New York Times)

Don DeLillo's latest epic, Underworld, brilliantly interweaves voices, incidents and telling details into a moving, empowering people's history. If Libra, White Noise and Mao II hadn't already done enough to persuade British readers that DeLillo ranks with the best of contemporary American novelists, Underworld surely will. (Blake Morrison Independent on Sunday)

DeLillo suddenly fills the sky. Underworld renders DeLillo a great novelist . . . [it] surges with magisterial confidence through time (the last half-century) and through space (Harlem, Phoenix, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Texas, the Bronx) . . . It isn't every day, or even every decade, that one sees the ascension of a great writer. (Martin Amis Esquire)

Among other things, the new novel from Don DeLillo is a remarkable feat of engineering . . . he chisels and carves until he has made something that cannot help but lift your heart: a cathedral of prose . . . He has built a towering structure and I recommend you climb to the top. The view is sensational. (Allison Pearson Evening Standard)

With Underworld, DeLillo confirms himself in the select group of great American writers truly equal to the temper of very strange times. (Times Literary Supplement)

Underworld is nothing less than the story of the States in the Cold War; an epic to set alongside Moby Dick or Augie March. (Tim Adams Observer)

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1447289390
• ISBN 13: 9781447289395
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 832