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Summary
Summary
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
One of The New York Times Book Review 's 10 Best Books
"A great American novel, a masterpiece, a thrilling page-turner." -- San Francisco Chronicle
*With a new preface by Don DeLillo on the 25th anniversary of publication*
Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel was a major bestseller when it was published in 1997 and was the most widely reviewed novel of the year. It opens with a legendary baseball game played between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants in 1951. The home run that won the game was called the Shot Heard Round the World, and was shadowed by the terrifying news that on the same day, Russia tested its first hydrogen bomb. Underworld then tells the story of Klara Sax and Nick Shay, and of a half century of American life during the Cold War and beyond.
"A dazzling, phosphorescent work of art." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"This is a novel that draws together baseball, the Bomb, J. Edgar Hoover, waste disposal, drugs, gangs, Vietnam, fathers and sons, comic Lenny Bruce and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It also depicts passionate adultery, weapons testing, the care of aging mothers, the postwar Bronx, '60s civil rights demonstrations, advertising, graffiti artists at work, Catholic education, chess and murder. There's a viewing of a lost Eisenstein film, meditations on the Watts Tower, an evening at Truman Capote's Black & White Ball, a hot-air balloon ride, serial murders in Texas, a camping trip in the Southwest, a nun on the Internet, reflections on history, one hit (or possibly two) by the New York mob and an apparent miracle. As DeLillo says and proves, 'Everything is connected in the end.'" -- Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World
" Underworld is an amazing performance, a novel that encompasses some five decades of history, both the hard, bright world of public events and the more subterranean world of private emotions. It is the story of one man, one family, but it is also the story of what happened to America in the second half of the 20th century." -- The New York Times
"Astonishing...A benchmark of twentieth-century fiction, Underworld is stunningly beautiful in its generous humanity, locating the true power of history not in tyranny, collective political movements or history books, but inside each of us." --Greg Burkman, The Seattle Times
"It's hard to imagine a way people might better understand American life in the second half of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first than by reading Don DeLillo. The scale of his inquiry is global and historic... His work is astounding, made of stealthy blessings... it proves to my generation of writers that fiction can still do anything it wants." --Jennifer Egan, in her presentation of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
" Underworld is a page-turner and a masterwork, a sublime novel and a delight to read." --Joan Mellen, The Baltimore Sun
Author Notes
Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including White Noise , which was made into a Netflix film, Libra , Underworld , Falling Man , and Zero K . He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2013, DeLillo was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and in 2015, the National Book Foundation awarded DeLillo its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Reviews (1)
Guardian Review
Underworld is self-consciously a map of the American late 20th century. Yet to hold together its different characters and their stories, it relies on an old-fashioned, even quaint, fictional device. Running through this complex novel is the story of an object: a baseball. We first see the ball, in the novel's bravura opening section, being hit into the crowd for the winning home run in a famous game between the New York Dodgers and the New York Giants on October 3 1951. Underworld gives us a history of this ball, a secular relic for those who possess it. The novel's own historical investigator is Marvin Lundy, a collector of baseball memorabilia - a man dedicated to the preservation of national memory (though his own speech is characterised by his habit of forgetting words and names). He has set out to find the ball, but also to work out "the lineage", as he calls it. Only the reader knows, from early in the novel, what happened to it in the seconds after it flew into the crowd. We see Cotter Martin, a poor black teenager who has gatecrashed the game, managing, by luck and quickness and finally ruthless strength, to get the ball for which many others are reaching. We also know where it has ended up. One of the novel's central characters, Nick Shay (a fan of the Dodgers, who lost to that last-minute home run), has bought it (for $34,500) for its "mystery of bad luck, the mystery of loss". The novel follows the ball's history in-between. The idea of fitting a society into a novel by following an object is an old one. The device was popular in the 18th century, especially after Francis Coventry's satirical novel Pompey the Little (1751). The title of this anatomy of Georgian absurdities is the name of the lapdog whose fortunes Coventry describes. Each owner is a representative character (a fop, a Methodist, a prostitute, and so on). Critics sometimes call such a narrative a "novel of circulation". One of the bestselling novels of the 18th century was another such: Charles Johnstone's Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea (1760-5), which follows a gold coin through the hands of the great, the vicious and the foolish. In the following decades, simi lar novels became popular. There were the stories of a cat, a watch, a pincushion and a coach. In the 19th century they were rarer, though Douglas Jerrold, one of the founders of Punch magazine, did publish The Story of a Feather , in 1843. It follows the passage of an ostrich feather through the different classes of Victorian society. It produces a form well suited to satire but unable to linger with any particular person. Recently the sub-genre has reappeared, notably with Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes (1996). Beginning in the 1890s, this follows the eponymous musical instrument as it passes from hand to immigrant hand down the course of an American century. Here the circulation novel is a way of taking us into different cultures, separated from each other yet belonging to the same nation. It is also a way of spanning history. DeLillo likes the device for its historical utility. His "Shot Heard Round the World" was struck on the baseball field on the day that the Soviet Union first tested an atom bomb. The aftershock of this event ripples through the novel. Seeing what happens to the baseball is a way of taking us through American life in the cold war and its aftermath. In Underworld we discover that the true history of this American relic will lead to further connections, whose web is in-visible to the characters. So, for instance, the man to whom Cotter's father sells the baseball (for $34.25) gives it to his son, Chuckie Wainwright. Chuckie flies on a B-52 in Vietnam that later gets made into conceptual art by Klara Sax, Nick's former lover. Another of the ball's temporary owners is shot by the Texas Highway Killer, whose terrifying, mysterious exploits recur through the novel. Possession of the baseball pulls characters into the unsettling and underground connectedness of American life. John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College London. Read his archived pieces and have your say at guardian.co.uk/ books or write to Review, The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER. To order Underworld for pounds 8 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979 Caption: article-mullan26.1 The idea of fitting a society into a novel by following an object is an old one. The device was popular in the 18th century, especially after Francis Coventry's satirical novel Pompey the Little (1751). The title of this anatomy of Georgian absurdities is the name of the lapdog whose fortunes Coventry describes. Each owner is a representative character (a fop, a Methodist, a prostitute, and so on). Critics sometimes call such a narrative a "novel of circulation". One of the bestselling novels of the 18th century was another such: Charles Johnstone's Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea (1760-5), which follows a gold coin through the hands of the great, the vicious and the foolish. - John Mullan.
Excerpts
Excerpts
From Part 5, Better Things For Better Living Through Chemistry: Selected Fragments Public and Private in the 1950s and 1960s, Chapter 3, January 11, 1955 We were about thirty miles below the Canadian border in a rambling encampment that was mostly barracks and other frame structures, a harking back, maybe, to the missionary roots of the order -- except the natives, in this case, were us. Poor city kids who showed promise; some frail-bodied types with photographic memories and a certain uncleanness about them; those who were bright but unstable; those who could not adjust; the ones whose adjustment was ordained by the state; a cluster of Latins from some Jesuit center in Venezuela, smart young men with a cosmopolitan style, freezing their weenies off; and a few farmboys from not so far away, shyer than borrowed suits. "Sometimes I think the education we dispense is better suited to a fifty-year-old who feels he missed the point the first time around. Too many abstract ideas. Eternal verities left and right. You'd be better served looking at your shoe and naming the parts. You in particular, Shay, coming from the place you come from." This seemed to animate him. He leaned across the desk and gazed, is the word, at my wet boots. "Those are ugly things, aren't they?" "Yes they are." "Name the parts. Go ahead. We're not so chi chi here, we're not so intellectually chic that we can't test a student face-to-face." "Name the parts," I said. "All right. Laces." "Laces. One to each shoe. Proceed." I lifted one foot and turned it awkwardly. "Sole and heel." "Yes, go on." I set my foot back down and stared at the boot, which seemed about as blank as a closed brown box. "Proceed, boy." "There's not much to name, is there? A front and a top." "A front and a top. You make me want to weep." "The rounded part at the front." "You're so eloquent I may have to pause to regain my composure. You've named the lace. What's the flap under the lace?" "The tongue." "Well?" "I knew the name. I just didn't see the thing." He made a show of draping himself across the desk, writhing slightly as if in the midst of some dire distress. "You didn't see the thing because you don't know how to look. And you don't know how to look because you don't know the names." He tilted his chin in high rebuke, mostly theatrical, and withdrew his body from the surface of the desk, dropping his bottom into the swivel chair and looking at me again and then doing a decisive quarter turn and raising his right leg sufficiently so that the foot, the shoe, was posted upright at the edge of the desk. A plain black everyday clerical shoe. "Okay," he said. "We know about the sole and heel." "Yes." "And we've identified the tongue and lace." "Yes," I said. With his finger he traced a strip of leather that went across the top edge of the shoe and dipped down under the lace. "What is it?" I said. "You tell me. What is it?" "I don't know." "It's the cuff." "The cuff." "The cuff. And this stiff section over the heel. That's the counter." "That's the counter." "And this piece amidships between the cuff and the strip above the sole. That's the quarter." "The quarter," I said. "And the strip above the sole. That's the welt. Say it, boy." "The welt." "How everyday things lie hidden. Because we don't know what they're called. What's the frontal area that covers the instep?" "I don't know." "You don't know. It's called the vamp." "The vamp." "Say it." "The vamp. The frontal area that covers the instep. I thought I wasn't supposed to memorize." "Don't memorize ideas. And don't take us too seriously when we turn up our noses at rote learning. Rote helps build the man. You stick the lace through the what?" "This I should know." "Of course you know. The perforations at either side of, and above, the tongue." "I can't think of the word. Eyelet." "Maybe I'll let you live after all." "The eyelets." "Yes. And the metal sheath at each end of the lace." He flicked the thing with his middle finger. "This I don't know in a million years." "The aglet." "Not in a million years." "The tag or aglet." "And the little metal ring that reinforces the rim of the eyelet through which the aglet passes. We're doing the physics of language, Shay." "The little ring." "You see it?" "Yes." "This is the grommet," he said. "Oh man." "The grommet. Learn it, know it and love it." "I'm going out of my mind." "This is the final arcane knowledge. And when I take my shoe to the shoemaker and he places it on a form to make repairs -- a block shaped like a foot. This is called a what?" "I don't know." "A last." "My head is breaking apart." "Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things. If they weren't important, we wouldn't use such a gorgeous Latinate word. Say it," he said. "Quotidian." "An extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace." His white collar hung loose below his adam's apple and the skin at his throat was going slack and ropy and it seemed to be catching him unprepared, old age, coming late but fast. I put on my jacket. "I meant to bring along a book for you," he said. Copyright © 1997 by Don DeLillo Excerpted from Underworld: A Novel by Don DeLillo All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
