A winding, rambling, beautifully written and often fascinating book about NYC, nostalgia, and our modern world of weapons (nuclear) and waste. Do not come here looking for a plot.
DeLillo's epic story is a eulogy to post-WWII 'free' America. Some brilliant passages, and some forgettable ones. The story winds and weaves through different characters in the US (mainly New York) between the 1950s and 1980s, dabbling in popular culture (Sinatra and Lenny Bruce), politics (J Edgar Hoover) and TV-fed sensationalism. The strength of the story is sometimes lost in the use of popular characters, and the impact of the writing never hits home, possibly because other books have dealt with the dynamics of Cold War politics and post-Reaganomics in a more jarring way (such as Infinite Jest), but the strong sections are often phenomenal.
DeLillo exemplifies the high-literary, late twentieth-century White American Male style to which I aspired, at the peak of my ambitions twenty years ago, but I find that I can barely stand it today. Most prominently, the pretentious, faux-everyman dialogue that was uniformly spouted by the characters irrespective of the decade in which they were supposed to be speaking left me in a permanent state of eye-roll. I was only able to get all the way through the book by keeping a running tally of the ratio of "instances of clueless bigotry" to "moments of transcendent writing." Unfortunately, the final score was 66-32. I had resolved that a losing score of this sort would mean a one-star rating, but at least I can say that some of the characters grew on me over the course of these very long 827 pages, enough to bump it up to two stars.
I was ready at the halfway point to copy a single sentence from this novel to use as my review. Page 415: "He thought they were too damned earnest."
But then, somehow, it got better.
Underworld starts beautifully; the retelling of the baseball game, the Shot Heard Round the World, through known historical figures and DeLillo's own creations, was fascinating. But it got pretty heavy pretty quickly. The tone is unvarying for hundreds of pages. All of the interactions are poignant. All of the moments are momentous - metaphors for something much larger. It's just exhausting and depressing.
And, even after it 'got better', the tone never lightens. Eventually, DeLillo constructs some direction and starts pulling together his threads and things resolve. It's not entirely satisfying, but the last third of the novel is a rescue of sorts. As always, DeLillo writes amazing sentences and scenes and makes very human …
I was ready at the halfway point to copy a single sentence from this novel to use as my review. Page 415: "He thought they were too damned earnest."
But then, somehow, it got better.
Underworld starts beautifully; the retelling of the baseball game, the Shot Heard Round the World, through known historical figures and DeLillo's own creations, was fascinating. But it got pretty heavy pretty quickly. The tone is unvarying for hundreds of pages. All of the interactions are poignant. All of the moments are momentous - metaphors for something much larger. It's just exhausting and depressing.
And, even after it 'got better', the tone never lightens. Eventually, DeLillo constructs some direction and starts pulling together his threads and things resolve. It's not entirely satisfying, but the last third of the novel is a rescue of sorts. As always, DeLillo writes amazing sentences and scenes and makes very human people you can get to know.
Rounding up from 3.5.
This needs some explaining. After rating many hundreds of read books, this one had me the most perplexed as to how to rate it. I was thinking, either a 3 or a 5. A three, or a five?! It was suggested I average it out as a 4, but that seemed to me to just misrepresent both ratings.
There is no question for me that the writing in this book is 5 star, all the way. Though the lengthy baseball stadium scene at the beginning, packed with American cliches and the slapstick team of Hoover and Gleason, started me off decisively thinking I was not at all going to like this book, it won me over with its amazing presentation and acute powers of observation. To my amazement I found myself eventually able to see the baseball game (and fans) from a whole other perspective than I thought possible. …
This needs some explaining. After rating many hundreds of read books, this one had me the most perplexed as to how to rate it. I was thinking, either a 3 or a 5. A three, or a five?! It was suggested I average it out as a 4, but that seemed to me to just misrepresent both ratings.
There is no question for me that the writing in this book is 5 star, all the way. Though the lengthy baseball stadium scene at the beginning, packed with American cliches and the slapstick team of Hoover and Gleason, started me off decisively thinking I was not at all going to like this book, it won me over with its amazing presentation and acute powers of observation. To my amazement I found myself eventually able to see the baseball game (and fans) from a whole other perspective than I thought possible. This is 5 star stuff. And it just keeps going, and going, and going...
And yet, honestly, the book is extremely American, and as much as I'm dazzled by the writing and observations, the characters and content just don't speak to me personally very much. Hence, for me, though the writing is top notch, I can't get much beyond "liked it" (3 stars).
So, seeking enlightenment, I naturally read a bunch of reviews here to get a sense of how others have evaluated this work. There's very little middle ground. There's a blanket of 4 and 5 stars, peppered with shotgun blasts of of 1 star holes.
The 1 star hits are, without a doubt, the more substantial (sadly) and fun to read. I guess the 5 star reviewers are just too in awe and humbled to attempt to write anything insightful after completing the masterpiece? What more is there to say?
I am in entire sympathy with most of the 1 star reviews I read. Yes, the book really feels long. Yes, what "plot" there is, there hardly is. Yes, Delillo is brutally long winded. Yes, it can't help but drag on probably even the most ardent fan in places. Yes, it's really hard to hang on to the thread, and not drift off into the aether of words.
I am in sympathy with those who "did not like", for these reasons. They are justified in this perspective. And yet I am also sad. They seem to have missed so much. I feel, when confronted with such a sweeping, complexly structured, and yet minutely detailed work as this, that the lack is in us the readers rather than in the text. This is a work we really do need to expand ourselves and apply ourselves to connect with, as lovers of literature, lovers of observation, and lovers of life.
And so, slightly ironically, it was the delightful and painful one star reviews that pushed me from the middle of the road into the extremely starry expanse. This book deserves the stars, even if I don't entirely feel them.
I still like White Noise more (the only other Delillo I've thus far read) -- though it has less stars from me.
I hope this explanation of my here aberrant rating is satisfactory (to me).
