Underworld is a 1997 novel by American writer Don DeLillo. The novel is centered on the efforts of Nick Shay, a waste management executive who grew up in the Bronx, to trace the history of the baseball that won the New York Giants the pennant in 1951, and encompasses numerous subplots drawn from American history in the second half of the twentieth century. Described as both postmodernist and a reaction to postmodernism,[1] it examines themes of nuclear proliferation, waste, and the contribution of individual lives to the course of history.
A best-seller that was nominated for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, Underworld is often regarded as DeLillo's supreme achievement. In 2006, a survey of eminent authors and critics conducted by The New York Times named Underworld as the runner-up for the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years, behind only Toni Morrison's Beloved.[2]
Background
Following the publication of the well-regarded novels White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), and Mao II (1991), DeLillo made few public appearances and published little for several years while writing Underworld, besides the folio short story Pafko at the Wall which was incorporated into the prologue of Underworld with minor changes.
According to DeLillo, the novel's title came to him as he thought about radioactive waste buried deep underground and about Pluto, the god of death.[3] DeLillo has said that the front page of The New York Times on October 4, 1951, inspired Underworld.[4]
The remainder of the novel, comprising six parts and an epilogue, is a reverse chronological account of the life of Nick Shay, the man who ultimately ends up with the baseball, from his undirected existence as an executive of a waste management company in Arizona in the 1990s back to his childhood in the Bronx in the 1950s, though the non-linear narrative includes a large number of digressions and ancillary subplots.
Part 1 takes place in 1992. Nick Shay lives in Arizona with his wife, Marian, who is having an affair with his colleague, Brian Glassic. Nick visits an art installation of painted B-52 aircraft in the desert by Klara Sax, with whom Nick is later revealed to have had an affair forty years earlier. It is revealed that Nick killed a man when he was a teenager, and that Nick's father disappeared when Nick was a child after going out to get a pack of Lucky Strikes. Nick prefers to imagine that he was killed by the Mafia. In a flashback to 1951, Cotter Martin's father takes the baseball from his son with the intention of selling it.
In Part 2, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Marian begins her affair with Brian, while Nick acquires the baseball from an avid baseball memorabilia collector named Marvin Lundy after Brian meets Lundy on a trip to New York City to see the Fresh Kills Landfill. Elsewhere, in the Bronx, a pessimistic, germophobic nun named Sister Edgar, who was Nick Shay's Catholic school teacher in the 1950s, works among the unbelieving poor and sick. A videotape of a serial killer nicknamed the Texas Highway Killer is described.
In Part 3, in the spring of 1978, Nick attends a waste management conference in the Mojave Desert and meets a swinger named Donna, while Marvin Lundy traces the baseball to San Francisco.
Part 4, in the summer of 1974, mainly concerns Klara Sax, who is working as an artist in New York City, and Matt Shay, Nick's brother, a former chess prodigy, who is a scientist in the nuclear weapons program in New Mexico.
Part 5 encompasses the 1950s and 1960s, beginning with Nick Shay in juvenile detention, following Nick's relationship with a woman named Amy and later with his future wife Marian, and Matt's courtship of his wife Janet. Lenny Bruce's comedy routines on the Cuban Missile Crisis are mentioned several times. In another flashback, Cotter Martin's father sells his baseball to Charles Wainright, a white fan standing in line with his son outside of Yankee Stadium.
Part 6, from the fall of 1951 to the summer of 1952, relates how Nick Shay, running loose after his father left his family, accidentally kills his friend George Manza.
In the epilogue, Nick and Brian travel to Kazakhstan to watch a demo of a new waste disposal system that incinerates the waste with a nuclear explosion. Nick confronts Brian about his affair with Marian, but decides to stay with Marian. Esmeralda, a feral girl in the Bronx whom the Catholic nuns were trying to save, is raped and murdered. Her image then miraculously appears on a billboard. Sister Edgar dies shortly after witnessing the miracle.
Literary significance and reception
Underworld received high acclaim from literary critics, particularly for DeLillo's prose and ambition. David Wiegand of the San Francisco Chronicle declaring it DeLillo's "best novel and perhaps that most elusive of creatures, a Great American Novel."[5] Many have described the book as emotionally powerful.[6]David Foster Wallace wrote DeLillo a letter in 1997, praising the novel and DeLillo's talent. He described "the book as an organic thing"[7] and stated that
This novel is (1) a great and significant piece of art fiction; (1a) not like any novel I've read; (2) your best work ever, so far; (3) a huge reward for someone who's read all your previous stuff because it seems to be at once a synthesis and a transfiguration – a transcendence – of your previous stuff; (4) a book in which nothing is skimped or shirked or tossed off or played for the easy laugh, and where (it seems to me) you've taken some truly ballsy personal risks and exposed parts of yourself and hit a level of emotion you've never even tried for elsewhere (at least as I've read your work).[7]
He also remarked on the phonetics of the novel, telling Delillo "you use these Saxonic devices heavily and over and over and yet the prose never seems heavy or straining; in fact just the opposite: it always seems exquisitely controlled, sober, poised rather than lunging."[7]
Other critics, however, praised DeLillo's prose but found the novel overlong and argued it could have benefited from more editing.[6][8] On Salon.com, Laura Miller wrote that "Nick's secret, the one that supposedly provides the book's suspense, proves anticlimactic."[9]
In May 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Underworld as a runner-up for the best work of American fiction of the previous 25 years. It garnered 11 of 125 votes, losing to Toni Morrison's Beloved by four votes.[2]
The novel has J. Edgar Hoover utterly intrigued by The Triumph of Death, a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Hoover first sees the painting while at the baseball game; the painting was reproduced in Life and pieces of it fall on him when someone in the stands above tears up the magazine and tosses the pieces. Later in the book he obtains a print of the painting.
Other references include a historical and biographical account of the building of the Watts Towers. There are also frequent references to The Honeymooners.[citation needed]
Adaptation
The novel was at one point optioned by producer Scott Rudin for a film adaptation before it lapsed. In 2002, Robert Greenwald held the rights and was in discussions for turning it into a television miniseries.[15]
In 2020, Uri Singer acquired the rights to the novel. In September 2021, it was announced that Netflix will be adapting the novel into a feature film with Theodore Melfi as writer and director and Singer as producer.[16]
Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
Clyde Anderson Tolson was the second-ranking official of the FBI from 1930 until 1972, from 1947 titled Associate Director, primarily responsible for personnel and discipline. He was the mentor and long-time top deputy of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel published in 1997 concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk". It is the first in Roth's American Trilogy, followed by I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000).
Libra is a 1988 novel by Don DeLillo that describes the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and his participation in a fictional CIA conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. The novel blends historical fact with fictional supposition.
Arthur Avenue is a street in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx, New York City, which serves as the center of the Bronx's "Little Italy". Although the historical and commercial center of Little Italy is Arthur Avenue itself, the area stretches across East 187th Street from Arthur Avenue to Beaumont Avenue, and is similarly lined with delis, bakeries, cafes and various Italian merchants.
White Noise is the eighth novel by Don DeLillo, published by Viking Press in 1985. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Hysterical realism is a term coined in 2000 by English critic James Wood to describe what he sees as a literary genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization, on the one hand, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena on the other. It is also known as recherché postmodernism.
Mao II, published in 1991, is Don DeLillo's tenth novel. The book tells the story of a novelist, struggling to finish a novel, who travels to Lebanon to assist a writer being held hostage. The title is derived from a series of Andy Warhol silkscreen prints depicting Mao Zedong. DeLillo dedicated the book to his friend Gordon Lish. Major themes of the book include crowds and the effects of political terrorism. Mao II received positive reviews from critics and won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992.
Gordon Lish is an American writer. As a literary editor, he championed many American authors, particularly Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Rick Bass, and Richard Ford. He is the father of the novelist Atticus Lish.
The Names (1982) is the seventh novel of American novelist Don DeLillo. The work, set mostly in Greece, is primarily a series of character studies, interwoven with a plot about a mysterious "language cult" that is behind a number of unexplained murders. Among the many themes explored throughout the work is the intersection of language and culture, the perception of American culture from both within and outside its borders, and the impact that narration has on the facts of a story.
Jerome Charyn is an American writer. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life, writing in multiple genres.
"Pafko at the Wall", subtitled "The Shot Heard Round the World", is a text by Don DeLillo that was originally published as a folio in the October 1992 issue of Harper's Magazine. It was later incorporated as the prologue in DeLillo's acclaimed novel Underworld (1997), with minor changes from the original version, such as a new opening line. In 2001, "Pafko" was re-released as a novella, by Scribner. This is the same version as printed in Underworld, where the section is titled "The Triumph of Death", in reference to the painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder.
Falling Man is a novel by American writer Don DeLillo, published May 15, 2007. An excerpt from the novel appeared in short story form as "Still Life" in the April 9, 2007, issue of The New Yorker magazine.
Point Omega is a short novel by the American author Don DeLillo that was published in hardcover by Scribner's on February 2, 2010. It is DeLillo's fifteenth novel published under his own name and his first published work of fiction since his 2007 novel Falling Man.
Thomas LeClair is a writer, literary critic, and was the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati until 2009. He has been a regular book reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, the Nation, the Barnes & Noble Review, and the Daily Beast.
Zero K is a 2016 novel by American author Don DeLillo.
Big Bang is a 2019 novel by American writer David Bowman, published almost seven years after his death. The introduction is by Jonathan Lethem and was excerpted in The New Yorker. It is Bowman's fourth book and the only one not published in his lifetime. Bowman worked on it for more than a decade. Its working title was Tall Cool One.
The Silence is a short novel by Don DeLillo. It was published by Scribner on October 20, 2020. An audiobook version was released the same day, narrated by Laurie Anderson, Jeremy Bobb, Marin Ireland, Robin Miles, Jay O. Sanders and Michael Stuhlbarg.
"What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?" is an informal opinion poll conducted in 2006 by the New York Times Book Review (NYTBR) to determine "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Eligible works were those written by an American author and published during the quarter-century period from 1980 through 2005. The poll was conducted by NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus, who sent letters to literary figures requesting their participation and received 124 responses. The results were published on May 21, 2006, in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. An essay by A. O. Scott, titled "In Search of the Best", reflected on the results and the premise of the "Great American Novel".
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