Underworld

I didn’t want to like Don Delillo’s Underworld. I am not sure why, sometimes books, like people, just strike you the wrong way. In general, I trust my instincts. I grudgingly began the big tome, hoping I was right. This is not a book that sucks you in easily. It keeps you interested as it slowly paints an enormous canvas. Underworld is a very ambitious novel, with a complex structure that, as a writer, is very humbling to watch unfold.

The novel begins on October 3, 1951 in the Polo Grounds with Bobby Thompson’s legendary home run to beat the Dodgers. “And the Giants win the pennant! And the Giants win the pennant!” The famous call. ‘The shot heard round the world’, very over the top New York, very American. This book is so steeped in Americana that I would be reluctant to reccomend it to a non-American. On that same day (in the novel), the Soviets detonate their first nuclear weapon. The Soviets actually detonated their third nuclear weapon on October 18, 1951; they tested their first weapon in 1949. The shot heard round the world is not that atomic bomb, its Bobby Thompson’s home run. I want to imagine the moment Delillo made the connection, the step back, the epiphany so immense that it inspired an 800+ page novel.

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