Underworld is a novel written by Don DeLillo. Released in 1997, it traces the history of the Shot Heard 'Round the World alongside other subjects relevant to the 1950s (such as the nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States).
Characters[]
- Nick Shay - a waste management executive who owns the baseball hit by Bobby Thomson in the 90s.
- Kara Sax - an artist whom Nick falls in love with in the 50s.
- Cotter Martin - a young black man who catches the baseball hit by Bobby Thomson.
- J. Edgar Hoover
- Jackie Gleason
- Frank Sinatra
- Bobby Thomson
- Ralph Branca
rest to be added
Publisher's summary[]
While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the Cold War and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying.
Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter—the "shot heard around the world"—and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.
"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.
Through fragments and interlaced stories—including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others—DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled.
See also[]
| Title | Author | Release date | Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Recognitions | William Gaddis | 1955 | A postmodernist novel with similar themes |
| Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace | 1996 | A postmodernist novel with similar themes |
| The Fifties | David Halberstam | 1991 | A similarly long book on the 1950s |
| The Great American Novel | Philip Roth | 1973 | A satirical novel with similar themes |
Sources[]
- Wikipedia
- Goodreads