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Underworld
First published 1997 · 983 pages
A sprawling, paranoid, and poetic autopsy of the American century, told through the interconnected lives of people living in the shadow of the bomb.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like standing in the center of a massive, echoing stadium after the crowd has gone home, surrounded by the ghosts of the American century. It is a sprawling, meandering masterpiece that demands patience, rewarding the reader with hyper-articulate, cinematic prose that elevates the mundane detritus of modern life into high art. The mood is steeped in a paranoid nostalgia, weaving backward through time to explore the hidden, subterranean connections between disparate lives during the Cold War. It is an elegiac and deeply atmospheric experience, capturing the collective anxieties of an era. This is a book for lovers of ambitious, heavy-hitting postmodern epics who want to lose themselves in a labyrinth of memory, waste, and history.
- Mood
- nostalgic
- sprawling
- melancholic
- atmospheric
- shadowy
- Tone
- elegiac
- paranoid
- observant
- cynical
- philosophical
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- the weight of history · American paranoia · memory and loss · the detritus of modern life · illusion of connection
- The writing
- Rhythmic, hyper-articulate, and cinematic, blending street-level vernacular with soaring, poetic observations of American life.
- The arc
- Moves from a sweeping, collective euphoria into a fragmented, melancholic search for personal meaning amidst historical ruin.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love ambitious, sprawling postmodern epics that dissect American culture, history, and the hidden connections between disparate lives.
Content notes
- violence
- sexual content
- substance abuse
- strong language
About the book
Nick Shay and Kiara Sax knew each other once, intimately and they meet again in the Sahara desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, she is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence. Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of The Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary -- Don DeLillos's greatest and most powerful work of fiction. -Back Cover
Description from Open Library.
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