Underworld
by Don DeLillo
A virtuosic piece of writing. It begins with a long overture set in the most famous professional baseball game of all time: “The Shot Heard Round The World,” the home run hit by Bobby Thomson [on 3 October] in 1951.
Recommendations from our site
“It’s such an extraordinarily vast and all-reaching book. Much of it is set in New York, and I think one thing DeLillo does so brilliantly—and does better than anyone else—is create a sense of cross-currents and coincidence. Of course, Manhattan is mainly a grid system of streets, so it really serves the book’s depiction of intersecting forces and intersecting lives. I loved and tried to steal some of that sense of the city enabling collisions, as well as the novel’s network of signs and their resonance. Obviously only DeLillo can do it like DeLillo but still, us flailing awed mortals have to try.” Read more...
Hermione Hoby on New York Novels
Hermione Hoby, Journalist
“This is DeLillo’s big, thick novel which ranges over several decades of American history. It’s a book about waste, about trash, about what society sweeps under the rug….Don DeLillo understands sport better than most as a very American enactment of the religious impulse. He understands sport as an American ritual and religion, with moments of collective catharsis or hysteria.” Read more...
Chad Harbach, Novelist
