apocryphal_goose's review against another edition
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
maybeclio's review against another edition
oh my god soooo long have to start over it's been like two years omg
sdibartola's review against another edition
4.0
When I was reading “Underworld” by Don DeLillo (1997), someone asked me what it was about. I said, “it’s about a baseball.” I got a wordless response somewhere between confusion and incredulity – the book is 827 pages long. It’s about the baseball thrown by Ralph Branca and hit into the left field stands by Bobby Thompson at the Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951 to give the New York Giants the pennant that year over the Brooklyn Dodgers. Myself, I was in Pittsburgh at the time and wouldn’t turn 1 year old until a couple of weeks after that game, but years later I am a Los Angeles Dodgers fan who remembers (and has kept the ticket stub from) a game at Chavez Ravine on May 11, 1963 when Sandy Koufax pitched a no-hitter against the San Francisco Giants. For many of us baseball is a nostalgic conduit to childhood. Maybe I should have said the book is about a young fictional Dodger fan named Nick Shay who grew up as an Italian Catholic kid in Brooklyn at the time (much like DeLillo himself). Actually, it’s pretty much about the entire last half the 20th century – specifically the effect of the Cold War on the American psyche. In fact, the October 5, 1997 NY Times review of the book by Martin Amis was subtitled, “How America learned to stop worrying and love the bomb” after Dr. Strangelove, the famous Kubrick film noir from 1964. In his September 16, 1997 NY times review, Michiko Kakutani says the book is about “both the hard, bright world of public events and the more subterranean world of private emotions in which individuals are connected by a secret calculus of hope and loss. 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.” That’s a better description.
The novel is about the contemporaneous chaos of life and the interconnectedness of events, personal and political. Nick Shay’s father Jimmy Costanza walked out one night for a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes and never came back. As Nick tries to make sense of this central event in his life, we get a major history lesson including America’s atomic bomb testing in New Mexico, the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War. It’s a challenging book to read in the way it jumps around in time, from character to character, and from story line to story line without warning, sometimes in the middle of a page. You have to be paying attention. The baseball travels through history too. It’s initially retrieved by Cotter Martin, a kid who plays hooky from school to “crash the gate” and attend the famous game on October 3, 1951. His father Manx sells the ball for $32.45 to advertising executive Charles Wainwright for all the money in his pocket while Wainwright is waiting in line with his young son Chuckie Jr to get tickets to the World Series. Years later, Nick buys the ball for 1000 times that amount from the compulsive baseball memorabilia hound, Marvin Lundy. The ball serves as a touchstone for Nick, bringing him back to his childhood in Brooklyn. It brings him back to that lost game and the loss of his father. We also have the story of Nick’s brother Matty who was a chess prodigy tutored by high school teacher Albert Bronzini, married at the time to Klara Sax with whom Nick has a brief steamy sexual affair when he is just 17. The second section of the book finds Nick visiting with the aging artist Klara as she is in the southwest preparing to paint a fleet of aging B52 bombers for an art project (one of the bombers with the moniker “Long Tall Sally” is the same one Chuckie Wainwright Jr served as navigator on during the Vietnam War). All of the characters in the book are unsettled and often jumpy. Klara hears the snapping of the Cinzano awnings at outdoor cafes in NY city and thinks at first she is hearing gunshots and Matty Shay and his girlfriend Janet Urbaniak jump at the sonic boom of jets flying over as they drive through the New Mexico desert thinking they are experiencing another nuclear test. The disturbed Texas highway shooter Richard Henry Gilkey haunts the book randomly shooting out his driver side window and killing drivers, the death of one of whom is caught on a child’s video camera – an unresolved story line reminiscent of the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, which itself also makes a cameo appearance. Talking about “Underworld” William Boyd writing in The Guardian (UK) in 1998 says, “this is what the novel can do, and indeed does, better than any other art form it gets the human condition, it skewers and fixes it in all its richness and squalor unlike anything else.” We have to wait the entire book to find out the circumstances of Nick’s shooting and killing of George (the waiter) Manza when Nick is just 17. Another theme of the story is the “underworld” that is the garbage-laden seamy underside of what seems to be the perfect 50’s world on the surface. The “Eisenhower-shiny world” to quote Susan Werner (“Last of the Good Straight Girls”).
Thompson’s homer was the “shot heard around the world,” and on the same day Russia announced it had tested (for the second time) a nuclear bomb. On the same day, Julius Rosenberg was sitting in a jail cell in Ossining NY bemoaning the Dodger loss. In March, 1951 he’d been convicted of passing US secrets about development of atomic weapons to the Russians. We find out much later in 2006 when Joshua Prager publishes “The Echoing Green” that Thompson knew that Branca’s pitch would be a fastball because the Giants were picking off the catcher’s signals using a small telescope and transmitting the signals to their dugout by wire. The story is populated too by several historical figures, notably J Edgar Hoover and Lenny Bruce.
The novel is about the contemporaneous chaos of life and the interconnectedness of events, personal and political. Nick Shay’s father Jimmy Costanza walked out one night for a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes and never came back. As Nick tries to make sense of this central event in his life, we get a major history lesson including America’s atomic bomb testing in New Mexico, the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War. It’s a challenging book to read in the way it jumps around in time, from character to character, and from story line to story line without warning, sometimes in the middle of a page. You have to be paying attention. The baseball travels through history too. It’s initially retrieved by Cotter Martin, a kid who plays hooky from school to “crash the gate” and attend the famous game on October 3, 1951. His father Manx sells the ball for $32.45 to advertising executive Charles Wainwright for all the money in his pocket while Wainwright is waiting in line with his young son Chuckie Jr to get tickets to the World Series. Years later, Nick buys the ball for 1000 times that amount from the compulsive baseball memorabilia hound, Marvin Lundy. The ball serves as a touchstone for Nick, bringing him back to his childhood in Brooklyn. It brings him back to that lost game and the loss of his father. We also have the story of Nick’s brother Matty who was a chess prodigy tutored by high school teacher Albert Bronzini, married at the time to Klara Sax with whom Nick has a brief steamy sexual affair when he is just 17. The second section of the book finds Nick visiting with the aging artist Klara as she is in the southwest preparing to paint a fleet of aging B52 bombers for an art project (one of the bombers with the moniker “Long Tall Sally” is the same one Chuckie Wainwright Jr served as navigator on during the Vietnam War). All of the characters in the book are unsettled and often jumpy. Klara hears the snapping of the Cinzano awnings at outdoor cafes in NY city and thinks at first she is hearing gunshots and Matty Shay and his girlfriend Janet Urbaniak jump at the sonic boom of jets flying over as they drive through the New Mexico desert thinking they are experiencing another nuclear test. The disturbed Texas highway shooter Richard Henry Gilkey haunts the book randomly shooting out his driver side window and killing drivers, the death of one of whom is caught on a child’s video camera – an unresolved story line reminiscent of the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, which itself also makes a cameo appearance. Talking about “Underworld” William Boyd writing in The Guardian (UK) in 1998 says, “this is what the novel can do, and indeed does, better than any other art form it gets the human condition, it skewers and fixes it in all its richness and squalor unlike anything else.” We have to wait the entire book to find out the circumstances of Nick’s shooting and killing of George (the waiter) Manza when Nick is just 17. Another theme of the story is the “underworld” that is the garbage-laden seamy underside of what seems to be the perfect 50’s world on the surface. The “Eisenhower-shiny world” to quote Susan Werner (“Last of the Good Straight Girls”).
Thompson’s homer was the “shot heard around the world,” and on the same day Russia announced it had tested (for the second time) a nuclear bomb. On the same day, Julius Rosenberg was sitting in a jail cell in Ossining NY bemoaning the Dodger loss. In March, 1951 he’d been convicted of passing US secrets about development of atomic weapons to the Russians. We find out much later in 2006 when Joshua Prager publishes “The Echoing Green” that Thompson knew that Branca’s pitch would be a fastball because the Giants were picking off the catcher’s signals using a small telescope and transmitting the signals to their dugout by wire. The story is populated too by several historical figures, notably J Edgar Hoover and Lenny Bruce.
fargestift's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
dpj's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
dominic's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
zacharyfoote's review against another edition
4.0
first 50 pages comprise what is perhaps my favorite single passage in a novel. delillo's descriptive power reaches a high water mark, and the book ends satisfyingly too. but man does one wish through 700 pages that the people within would not always speak as thematic arbiters but as Real People.
jani_e's review against another edition
challenging
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
4.0
joel_buck's review against another edition
5.0
Completely apart from what it's about, this book is like an 800-page mirror for all my inadequacies as as reader. I don't say that in self-pity or moping. I'm just sitting here in the wake of it, imagining how much time I could spend trying to get a handle on what all DeLillo's doing and documenting. I've obviously read all the buzz quotes in the front, and they're merited but still insufficient. I'm trying to think of what else to write that isn't just shamefully cliched. There's not a wasted word. It's a long book but I'm still floored by how much it does. I read the word "astonishing" on another dust jacket this past week (this is true) and it stuck in my craw and I was like "is that book really 'astonishing?' Will Underworld be 'astonishing?'" And I really had made up my mind that "astonishing" was too grandiose a word to be throwing around. It's not. I'm astonished. Dumbfounded, even.