DeLillo has written a gloriously fused history of the past 50 years that offers a key to understanding American culture--our preoccupations and obsessions, our fears, our loves, our lives--and a chance to reexperience it. He moves through this country's most diverse landscapes, gradually revealing his two central protagonists, Nick Shay, a "waste analyst", and Klara Sax, a renowned artist, who had a brief affair in the Bronx in 1952 when she was 32 and he, 17. "Underworld" maps the inner landscape of the Cold War, and in a ...
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DeLillo has written a gloriously fused history of the past 50 years that offers a key to understanding American culture--our preoccupations and obsessions, our fears, our loves, our lives--and a chance to reexperience it. He moves through this country's most diverse landscapes, gradually revealing his two central protagonists, Nick Shay, a "waste analyst", and Klara Sax, a renowned artist, who had a brief affair in the Bronx in 1952 when she was 32 and he, 17. "Underworld" maps the inner landscape of the Cold War, and in a mesmerizing interplay of public and private events, DeLillo illuminates both our past and the nature of memory itself.
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Though Underworld is a deep book, it is a long, long slog. With over eight hundred pages, multiple POVs, a scrambled chronology, a legion of characters, celebrity cameos, several intertwined themes and very little real action, Mr. DeLillo makes his readers work for very little reward. The book is ambitious. There?s a lot to think about and discuss. It?s a portrait of America during the Cold War and exposes the thin veneer of normalcy that covers the terrifying reality of both society and individual?the underworld. Yes, I get it. An avid reader, it took me almost a month, however, to get through it. For those of us whose reading time is precious and crave at least a modicum of action and entertainment in our stories, Underworld will disappoint. This is a novel only an English professor can love.
