Underworld [Paperback]

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. --Amazon.com

‘Underworld is a magnificent book by an American master’

‘This book is an aria and a wolf whistle of our half-century’

Opens at the Shea Stadium at the World Series Game of 1951, where the ball is caught by a young, black man in the crowd, and continues to change hands throughout the book. The various recipients of the ball tell the story of post-war US history giving a panorama of America from the 50s to the 90s.

‘A literary colossus, equal to any (and surpassing most) of the vaulting novels which strive for the immensity of the American mythic’ Geoff Dyer, Sunday Telegraph Underworld opens – famously – at the Dodgers–Giants 1951 National League final, where Bobby Thomson hits The Shot Heard Round the World and wins the pennant race for the Giants. But on the other side of the planet, another highly significant shot was fired: the USSR’s first atomic detonation. And so begins a masterpiece of gloriously symphonic storytelling. DeLillo loosely follows the fate of the winning baseball as the book swells and rolls through time. He offers a panoramic vision of America, defined by the overarching conflict of the cold war. This is an awe-inspiring story, seen in deep, clear detail, of men and women, together and apart, as they search for meaning, survival and connection in the toughest of times. ‘A rousingly impressive achievement in almost every novelistic department – dialogue, structure, timing, precise description, heartfelt veracity and the rest . . . In Underworld we have a mature and hugely accomplished novelist firing on all cylinders, at the sophisticated height of his multifarious powers’ William Boyd, Observer --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Reading the fiction of Don DeLillo is an utterly original experience: powerful, prescient, perceptive. Writing in a prose that is both majestic and muscular, his unerringly accurate vision penetrates deep into the soul of America and consistently leaves readers with a fresh perspective on the world. Since the publication of his first novel, in 1971, he has been acknowledged across the globe as one of the greatest writers of his generation. Underworld opens – famously – at the Dodgers–Giants 1951 National League final, where Bobby Thomson hits The Shot Heard Round the World and wins the pennant race for the Giants. But on the other side of the planet, another highly significant shot was fired: the USSR’s first atomic detonation. And so begins a masterpiece of gloriously symphonic storytelling. DeLillo loosely follows the fate of the winning baseball as the book swells and rolls through time. He offers a panoramic vision of America, defined by the overarching conflict of the cold war. This is an awe-inspiring story, seen in deep, clear detail, of men and women, together and apart, as they search for meaning, survival and connection in the toughest of times. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Don DeLillo is the author of two plays and thirteen novels, including Cosmopolis and The Body Artist. He has won the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.