The 100 best novels written in English / The full list
To understand Underworld, one needs to understand its structure first. The prologue is set during an iconic 1951 World Series baseball game attended by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and J. Edgar Hoover. Then, it skips to 1992 and 57 years old Nick Shay, traveling through the desert to meet his old flame Klara Sax. After that, it starts going to backwards again and bridges the 41 years gap between these two seemingly unrelated events. There’s no direct connection between the two events, but it doesn’t mean they’re not connected at all. On the contrary, Watson.
There is very little connection between the world depicted in Underworld and the one we live in today. If you haven’t lived in it, you’ll find little to no interest to Don DeLillo’s mammoth novel. It is set in a pre-internet, pre-9/11 society that most young adults haven’t experienced. So, Underworld is considerably more dated than DeLillo’s prescient work like Cosmopolis and White Noise or even Great Jones Street even if it was written close to twenty-five years later, but it’s one of the best, most comprehensive novels about post-World War II American living I’ve ever read.
Underworld is a novel of geopolitics. It’s also a quite intimate portrait of an American man and the idea of going through his life in reverse has one precise purpose: showing how the Cold War dictated the course of his life. Don DeLillo expresses this through Nick Shay’s job choice of waste management executive. Waste in a constant allegory throughout the novel for the irrepressible undercurrents that dictate the direction of our lives. The wastes Nick manages are a direct byproduct of the Cold War and the ever escalating arms race that terrified everyone in the twentieth century.
What you discover throughout Underworld is that the meek and mild-mannered executive has a violent, passionate nature he learned to control for his own survival. Nick Shay feels estranged from himself like many of us adults do. That interests beyond his control have taken possession of his personality in exchange for financial comfort and a vague sense of patriotic purpose. In Underworld, the Cold War dictates the lives of countless Americans. The macro dictates the micro. It doesn’t have the twenty-first century specifics, but it maps the structure of our contemporary lives.
So why should you read Underworld? By deconstructing a twentieth century adulthood, Don DeLillo exposed how political superstructures dictate our lives and it isn’t so different today. It sure has become a more insidious and seductive process with the advent of social media, but it is still a reality. I liked Underworld. It feels more like a tapestry of short stories than a novel and some character arcs you’ll definitely discard *, but it rewards patience like a VERY slow motion clip of a blooming rose. Not everone’s cup of tea, but some will see the beauty in it.
DEAD END FOLLIES
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