Underworld
by Don DeLillo
Summary
The novel opens with a meticulously reconstructed account of the October 3, 1951 Giants Dodgers pennant game, the day Bobby Thomson hit the home run known as the shot heard round the world, caught in the stands by a Black teenager named Cotter Martin while J. Edgar Hoover, also in attendance, is handed news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb. From there DeLillo works backward across four decades, following the same baseball as it passes through collectors' hands, centering eventually on Nick Shay, a waste management executive in 1990s Arizona who, it emerges, killed a man as a teenager in the Bronx in the early 1950s and has spent his adult life managing literal and figurative waste ever since. Nick's marriage is fraying, his wife Marian having had an affair with his colleague Brian Glassic, and DeLillo threads in dozens of historical set pieces along the way, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Lenny Bruce's stand up routines about nuclear anxiety, a nun named Sister Edgar working in the Bronx, connected to Hoover only by a shared name and a shared obsession with contamination. The epilogue jumps to Kazakhstan, where Nick and Brian witness a demonstration of nuclear waste disposal, DeLillo closing his history of the American second half of the century by returning it to the weapon whose shadow opened the book, the baseball itself finally less important than everything it has been made to carry.
It is long and structurally demanding, moving backward through time across more than eight hundred pages and dozens of characters, prose that rewards patient attention to recurring images, waste, weapons, baseball, more than to plot momentum.
Historical Context & Significance
Scribner published Underworld in October 1997. It was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award for fiction, losing to Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, and a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, losing to Philip Roth's American Pastoral; it won the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000, an honor given only once every five years for the most distinguished American fiction of that period, a genuine prize this book did take even after two bigger ones passed it over. David Foster Wallace, in a letter to DeLillo, called it your best work ever, so far, and the critic Harold Bloom named it the culmination of what DeLillo can do.
In 2006 the New York Times Book Review polled writers and critics on the best American fiction of the previous twenty five years; Underworld finished second to Toni Morrison's Beloved, a result many critics have cited since as evidence the book's true rank always sat closer to first than its own prize record shows.