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Our lives, our half century.

Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome -- the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World -- shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb.

The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, generates the narrative that follows. It takes the reader deeply into the lives of Nick and Klara and into modern memory and the soul of American culture -- from Bronx tenements to grand ballrooms to a B-52 bombing raid over Vietnam.

A generation's master spirits come and go. Lennny Bruce cracking desperate jokes, Mick Jagger with his devil strut, J. Edgar Hoover in a sexy leather mask. And flashing in the margins of ordinary life are the curiously connectecd materials of the culture. Condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs and miracle sites on the Web.

Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times -- Don DeLillo's greatest and most powerful work of fiction.

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Detritus of the modern age

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DeLillo's Underworld has some difficult aspects. It presents a history of a world in decline, as we follow (in rough shod fashion) the life of Nick Shay, a waste expert. DeLillo throws in snippets of times and other lives into the mix, for all too fleeting periods. Reading this book is maddening for all the unfinished stories. However, the total sum of its parts adds up to a great thesis. I have long wanted to read this book, but it took me a LONG time to read. Now I feel it has spoiled my reading to come. This is because DeLillo's writing is very masterful and intelligent and spare. I loved the theme - of the Cold War and the examination of the detritus of our (recent) times. Personally Nick's character did not resonate with me. There was the wrong kind of introspection and the most intriguing aspect of his life took too long to unfold. However the story of his father and his brother made sense as did that of Klara Sax. To read it now, it feels like DeLillo was ahead of his (political) time. I think he missed demonstrating the communist hysteria and the rejection of the foreign when the novel dips into the 50s and 60s. He does capture the fear and emptiness of the modern world and beginnings of the materialist mania that America was headed for very well. Overall, if you enjoy books that are challenging, please read this book. It may take some time, but it will be worth it.

In Search of a Latin Lover

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[....] Single Abroad: Tales of the Boyish Man is written for anyone who has ever been uncomfortable when trying to approach the opposite sex, dealing with Bike Cops in Butte County, traveling Europe or interviewing with ivy-league colleges. Covered in this book are the cheapest and most social hostels in Europe, the life of a Club Med host in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, the three features that make Mexico City unlike any other city in the world, how I managed not to get thrown out of Chico State University, the impact of the Russian Mafia in Southern Spain, the linguistic impact of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, the last 20 days of the Incan dynasty, how to live in Latin America for $25 a year, how to make the most out of a Euro Rail Pass, mastering a second language and how someone who can't even properly slice a tomato can get a job overseas in a Portuguese restaurant. This guidebook was designed for anyone wanting to explore a Latin approach to working, dating and travel.

"Under the surface of ordinary things"

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This took me two weeks, and I wondered if it'd be worth the effort. The heft of the book had discouraged me before, but the beginning bravura panorama of the Polo Grounds game and the closing pages with a less ostentatious, but surprisingly thought-provoking scene also in a New York where crowds gather for another miracle does manage to bookend this massive work satisfactorily. The challenges lie in what comes between, seven hundred pages of characters who you constantly shuffle among, unsure often who they might be for a few pages, or how they fit into the larger plot. De Lillo does not satisfy the reader wanting as in some Dickens novel all the characters to match up and align by the end. It's messier, and truer to life if not fictional craft of what we expect in a neat narrative. I liked this. The scope narrows and expands without warning, but by the last 100 pages, the vistas begin to enlarge and contract both. De Lillo takes on, by the conclusion, big questions, but he does not reduce them to pat answers. I almost forgot about more than one character, so attenuated might be the lapse before their earlier and later turns on stage. I wish the book came prefaced with a dramatis personae! Let the book continue, don't resist the occasionally puzzling dead end, and move on. Not all the subplots will find resolution anyway. You come away both humbled and puzzled by his conclusion, one I certainly never saw coming. Elements never quite fit, and the baseball's trajectory into the hands of various collectors does not align with the wanderings of the main figures as I'd anticipated. After a while, I learned to put up with the languid passages, and gained patience. The iconic baseball and the nuclear core represent the key symbols, but they are not as easily pegged down or pinned for a reader's facile understanding. This is a clever, haranguing, and frustrating story, for it's both hyper-aware in its jittery prose and smarter than the usual entertaining fare. It's serious, if with lots of clever put-downs thanks to the Italian American one-upsmanship, and while you may find certain characters that you glom onto with affection, others will bore you. Like life, their permanence in the plot as you get to know them will differ, and without warning, people drop in and out of the vast events. De Lillo alternates Nick Shay's first-person voice with many other ones, and while I wish the omniscient recorder of this diverse cast sometimes registered more emphatically the necessary accents, moods, and personalities, even those (like Klara and Sister Edgar) who bored me early on turned out to be worthwhile, albeit many many chapters later. Don't give up on anybody you encounter early on in these dense pages. The waste theme, the FBI-Hoover surveillance, the wanderings through deserts and suburbs, apocalyptic tension, and childhood wonder all emerge and overlap, again in a nearly imperceptible form for much of the time. The contrast of Nick's Italian neighborhood then vs. the Bronx today gradually assumes its symbolic significance, but very glacially. The pace has to slow often, so while the energy ebbs and flows, stick with the plot's byways and asides. The prose shimmers at times, yet more or less does not call as much attention to itself. Dependably intelligent, this book takes on enormous themes. I'm not convinced that De Lillo can not top this book. It recalls Roth, Dos Passos, Kesey, Hemingway, Updike, Mailer, Vonnegut, Heller, and Barth, to name a few American peers and predecessors. He's at the top of his game here, but I think he's capable of yet another turn or two at bat that might match or surpass this game.

An Utterly Non-Porus Book.

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Don DeLilo isn't to be trifled with. "Underworld" reads thickly and slowly, and I found it quite the challenge. Some days I could read thirty, forty pages, just go for hours and not notice the time, while other days I'd get maybe five pages read and have to quit. There is so much compressed on these pages, it feels akin to reading flourless chocolate cake; thick, slow, filling, and delicious. While I'm not saying every new page brings new joy, I am saying that the book as a whole certainly does. Once every few pages I would find myself dog-earing the book, to return to that section later. His understanding of people and of the human soul is phenomenal, I felt like I new every one of the characters at their most intimate and essential level. On the whole, I think this is one of the most masterful and excellent books I've read in years. A classic.

Non-traditional narrative, in an accessible, rewarding package

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In Alice in Wonderland, the White King explains how to tell a story: "Begin at the beginning and then go on till you come to the end: then stop." If you agree, don't read this book; you will hate it. But if you like non-traditional narrative, or are curious and willing to give it a try, this is a wonderful work for you to experience. It jumps back and forth in time throughout four decades; arrays a multitude of characters and story lines, some of which open but never close; and conveys its many messages in often-unexplained oblique allusions to other parts of the account. But the writing style is funny, and lucid, and accessible, and you will find yourself drawn in to the fractured story, told in as many facets as a well-cut diamond, of a baseball that became important (or maybe not) in a moment of time which was (like all moments in time) unique and which initiates the intersection of many worlds and lives. As there should be, there is a central character -- Nick Shay, whose personal history flows backward and forward from a shattering instant that is placed at the end of the book, but that is foretold and shapes the rest of it. Nick and his mother, absent father, brother, teachers, lover, wife, wife's lover, wife's-lover's-colleagues and on through many degrees of non-separation, form a constellation of vivid personalities and lives that rivet your attention. The times (Cold War decades) and places (mostly New York City, southwest U.S.) are refracted with insight, truth and humor. The book is lengthy, but once you give yourself to the non-linear narrative, it flows engagingly and easily. James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Doris Lessing all have written non-traditional narratives of great, but sometimes deadly and tedious, weight. De Lillo's Underworld, by contrast, is as much fun, as juicy, and as readable as other great non-traditions, such as Tristram Shandy -- and Alice in Wonderland.