Underworld

Underworld Review

Don DeLillo spent years writing Underworld, and the novel announces its ambitions immediately: the opening prologue, “The Triumph of Death,” reconstructs the 1951 National League playoff game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers — Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world” — as a simultaneous event with the Soviet Union’s second nuclear test. DeLillo puts J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, and Toots Shor in the Polo Grounds stands and has Hoover receive news of the Soviet test as the home run ball sails into the crowd. It is an audacious, almost scandalous piece of fiction, and it earns every page of what follows.

The novel’s central conceit — tracking the fate of that baseball through fifty years of American history — is, appropriately for DeLillo, less a plot than a formal principle. We follow the ball backwards: from the 1990s back toward 1951. The primary protagonist is Nick Shay, a waste management executive from the Bronx who has acquired the ball and carries it as a talisman of something he cannot quite name. Around Nick, DeLillo assembles a vast cast: his wife Marian, the artist Klara Sax (who paints decommissioned B-52 bombers in the Arizona desert), Lenny Bruce, Sister Edgar, a Texas Highway Killer, a graffiti artist in the South Bronx. The connections between these figures are sometimes direct, sometimes purely atmospheric — DeLillo is interested in the culture’s connective tissue, not its foreground narrative.

What DeLillo is tracking is nothing less than the inner life of postwar America: the way nuclear anxiety warped ordinary existence, the way waste — garbage, toxic material, discarded things — became the hidden substrate of consumer culture, the way images circulated and accumulated meaning across decades. The novel’s famous meditation on a Bruegel painting, “The Triumph of Death,” which Hoover studies as the game progresses, gives the book its title and its deepest theme: that beneath the surfaces of ordinary American life lies something vast and dark and not easily named.

Underworld is not a comfortable read. Its 827 pages contain long stretches of ruminative prose, sections where DeLillo seems more interested in sustaining a particular tone than in advancing any recognizable narrative. But this is, in a sense, the point — the novel’s form enacts its content. American life in the Cold War era was not experienced as a coherent narrative but as an accumulation of disconnected images and events, held together by fear and by the shared knowledge that everything might end at any moment. DeLillo’s formal experiment is his most honest response to that condition.

The Opening Prologue

The fifty-page prologue, “The Triumph of Death,” is one of the most celebrated set-pieces in American fiction. DeLillo reconstructs the 1951 National League tiebreaker game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers — Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ‘round the world” — as a fully realised historical event populated by fictional and historical figures simultaneously. He places J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, and Toots Shor in the Polo Grounds stands, and has Hoover receive news of the Soviet Union’s second nuclear test as the home run ball sails into the crowd.

The prologue announces the novel’s central formal and thematic principle: that American culture in the Cold War era was shaped by the double knowledge of victory and annihilation held simultaneously. The jubilation of sporting triumph and the terror of nuclear catastrophe were not separate experiences but a single compound one. The baseball and the bomb arrived on the same day in American consciousness.

The Novel’s Architecture

Underworld moves backwards in time across its 827 pages — from the 1990s to 1951 — in a structure where the causes of things are understood only after their consequences have been lived. We meet Nick Shay as a waste management executive before we understand what formed him; connections accumulate and clarify as the novel moves further from the present.

Born November 20, 1936 in the Bronx, DeLillo drew on his own neighbourhood and its history for significant portions of the novel. The South Bronx sections — the graffiti artist Ismael Muñoz, the community shaped by poverty and abandoned buildings — are rendered with the specificity of known territory, and they give the novel’s abstract cultural analysis a material grounding that prevents it from floating into pure idea.

Waste as Theme

The novel’s most provocative argument — that waste, the material by-product of consumer culture, is the hidden subject of postwar American history — is developed through Nick’s profession and through recurring images of garbage, toxic sites, and discarded objects. DeLillo argues that the American obsession with consumption was always paired with an anxiety about disposal: what do you do with what you no longer need? The waste stream is the underside of the consumer economy, and the novel’s title refers to the buried, discarded, repressed dimension of American life that consumer culture’s surface does not acknowledge.

Underworld is DeLillo’s most ambitious novel and the one that most fully earns the designation of great American novel — not because it resolves the contradictions of American life but because it maps them with honesty and formal intelligence across 827 pages of sustained, difficult, rewarding prose.

How to Read Underworld

827 pages is a significant commitment, and readers approaching Underworld for the first time are advised to treat the opening prologue as a separate experience. Read the prologue — “The Triumph of Death,” roughly fifty pages — and then decide. If the prologue’s dense, allusive, historically saturated prose feels engaging rather than tedious, the novel will reward the investment. If it feels like work without pleasure, this is not the right time to continue.

For readers who do commit: the novel’s reverse chronological structure means the early chapters (set in the 1990s) will feel deliberately fragmented, their connections unclear. The connections become clear only as the novel moves backward. DeLillo is asking for patience and trust, and he earns both. The experience of reading Underworld from beginning to end is one of the distinctive literary experiences of the late twentieth century — not comfortable, not always pleasurable in the conventional sense, but producing, by its final pages, a sense of having moved through something real.