Summary
In order to dramatize the theme that all people and events in the universe are connected, DeLillo presents several narrators and a series of chronologically dislocated events. Additionally, history and facts scattered throughout the novel connect the reader to DeLillo's fictional world. After the reader discovers how these disjointed experiences and characters are related, the message of the novel becomes clear. The novel is set in the world of American baseball from the 1950s to the early 1990's. In its famous 1951 opening scene, the Giants win a crucial game against the Dodgers thanks to Bobby Thompson's home run, at the same moment that the Russians successfully test the A-bomb, an event that signals the real beginning of the Cold War. Baseball and international politics drive the narrative, which centers on ex-ballplayer Nick Shay and an artist named Klara Sax, the woman he once loved. UNDERWORLD was nominated for the National Book Award.
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Media Reviews
"Working at the top of his form, DeLillo draws on his previous novels in shaping his most ambitious work yet, a grand Whitmanesque epic of postwar American life-a brainy, streetwise, and lyrical underground history of our times, full of menace and miracles..."
-- Kirkus
"[A]n amazing performance, a novel that encompasses some five decades of history....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....Though the novel is laugh-out-loud funny at times, DeLillo's satiric impulse is matched, in these pages, by a new willingness to probe beneath the surface of the characters' lives....Cutting back and forth in time and between a multitude of plot lines, DeLillo creates a wonderfully rich, elliptical narrative....[A] dazzling, phosphorescent work of art." -- Michiko Kakutani
-- New York Times
"The novel is an impressive feat of cerebration-a highly wrought and unbelievable theory about garbage and G-men joined to lament for lost community." -- James Bowman
-- Wall Street Journal
"UNDERWORLD may or may not be a great novel, but there is no question that it renders DeLillo a great novelist." -- Martin Amis
-- New York Times Book Review
"[T]he best English-language novel of the Nineties...." -- John Leonard
-- New York Review of Books
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published date: 2007
Size: 6.5 x 9.5 inches
Weight: 2.75 pounds
Pages: 827
Other Editions
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