Book Review 098 / Underworld by Don DeLillo

 

Classic Book Review

Underworld (1997)

by Don DeLillo

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 98 / Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)

When I was little, my mother used to read novels thick enough to kill a small pet or knock burglars unconscious. For my younger self, thick meant serious. An emotional journey someone willingly undertakes under the promise of transcendent rewards. Although I should know better today, long novels still have a magnetic appeal for me. I’ve been looking for the perfect time to read Don DeLillo’s Underworld for a couple years now and I’m glad to tell you that time has come. And like every novel over 500 pages I’ve ever read, it’s both awesome and insufferable in an insular way.

 

How September 11 changed the fiction landscape in 13 novels

Ron Charles

September 10, 2021

The demonic choreography of al-Qaeda’s attack on the United States instantly rendered September 11, 2001 the most documented act of terrorism in human history. As the North Tower of the World Trade Centre burned, cameras already on the scene filmed the second plane soaring into the South Tower. Those appalling images, infinitely reproduced, colonised the minds and imaginations of a generation.

Martin Amis and Don DeLillo/ Two literary lions, offer starkly different takes on the world / Reviews

 

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Martin Amis and Don DeLillo, two literary lions, offer starkly different takes on the world: Review

In a book he dubs "novelized biography," Martin Amis offers his Inside Story on love, loss, and mortality, while Don DeLillo confronts the perils of the modern world (and what happens without it) in The Silence.

By Leah Greenblatt 

October 16, 2020 at 11:00 AM EDT

Inside Story by Martin Amis

Martin Amis has hardly lived an unprolific life: His catalog contains some 30 works of fiction and nonfiction, along with uncountable correctives, essays, and opinions. Or an unexamined one; his bestselling 2000 memoir Experience famously captured the towering figure of his father, the late British novelist Kingsley Amis, and the familial winds that shaped him.

But all that feels like a warm-up, in many ways, for his latest — 521 dense, zigzagging pages of what he likes to call a “novel, not loosely but fairly strictly autobiographical.” If you can parse that, you may have a running start on Inside Story: a giant octopus of a book spritzing out regular inky puffs of lit-world gossip, historical digressions, romantic confessions, and vintage score-settling, with footnotes. It is also, nominally, a guide on how to write (take on sex, dreams, and religion at your own peril, he advises; be equally suspect of alliteration).

At its heart, though, which almost always also means at its best, Story is the tale of three losses: Saul Bellow, Christopher Hitchens, and Philip Larkin. The first was a long-ago interview subject who became a beloved mentor and friend; the second, a peer and platonic soul mate; the third is a little more complicated. (Larkin’s fabled poetry, Amis largely admires; his status as a family acquaintance and a sort of anti–bon vivant, less so.)

None of them died easy deaths; Hitchens’, following esophageal cancer in 2011 at age 62, remains an open wound for Amis, and the one that inspires the book’s most intimate and illuminating chapters. His great Martin-y mind is still a thing to marvel at, all the clever wordplay and synaptic leaps, but it’s the tender, ordinary moments — watching old movies with a gently addled Bellow, eating Tex-Mex near the Houston hospital where “Hitch” spent his last days — that stay. —Leah Greenblatt

The Silence by Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo has been writing about imagined dystopias for nearly half a century; it just took this long, apparently, for reality to catch up with him. So it’s all the more disappointing to see such a master punting the subject as perfunctorily as he does in The Silence, a cool, fragmentary slip of a novella centered around some sort of vague catastrophic event.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday 2022, and a clutch of comfortable New Yorkers — a poet, a professor, a claims adjuster — gather to watch the game when the television screen suddenly pixelates and goes blank; other machines soon follow. Even at 84, DeLillo’s shrewd, darkly comic observations about the extravagance and alienation of contemporary life can still slice like a scalpel when he wants them to; Silence, though, settles mostly for paper cuts. —LG

EXPLORE ENTERTAIMENT

The Silence by Don DeLillo review / The machine stops

 

BOOK OF THE DAY

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

The Silence by Don DeLillo review – the machine stops

Planes go down and screens go dark in this slim apocalyptic tale from a master stylist

The 100 best novels / No 98 / Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)

Anne Enright

Thu 22 Oct 2020 07.30 BST

A

t some point in the editorial process, a rogue line crept into The Silence. The sentence was about airports, masks and Covid-19, and it all seemed thrillingly current, except that Don DeLillo didn’t write it. “Somebody else” may have wanted the book to seem more contemporary, he said in an interview with the New York Times. “But I said: ‘There’s no reason for that.’ So they took it out again.”

Bright, barbed … Josie Lawrence and Joe McGann in rehearsal for Love-Lies-Bleeding. Photograph: Henry C Krempels

Interview

Don DeLillo on Trump's America: 'I'm not sure the country is recoverable'

He has spent half a century dissecting America’s dreams and nightmares. Now the great novelist is imagining what his ‘deluged’ country will be like three years from today

Xan Brooks
Monday 5 November 2018

Whenever he’s able to separate himself from the distractions of daily life, from family obligations and the rolling thunder of 24-hour news, Don DeLillo taps out a few pages of his latest book. He writes out of habit and because he’s in the grip of an idea that won’t let him rest. He’s constructing a story set around the next corner, in an America he may not live to see. Obliquely, unavoidably, he’s writing about Donald Trump.

Lost in DeLillo

LOST IN DELILLO

JUNE 21, 2018 LAURENWHITEEE

Newsletter 4.2 (2010)

—Randy Laist

When I finished the manuscript of my recent book on Don DeLillo, Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’s Novels, I knew that I wanted my next project to be a kind of vacation from the hypnotic seriousness and esoteric hyper-literacy that I had come to associate with DeLillo’s writing.  When an opportunity presented itself to edit a collection of essays about the television show Lost, my first thought was that this excursion into a madcap expression of popular culture would be a perfect change of pace.  Imagine my surprise when one of the first writers to contact me with an abstract was Jesse Kavadlo, whose book about DeLillo, Balance at the Edge of Belief, had been published by the same press that issued my DeLillo book.  As the abstracts continued to come in, it became a recurring pattern that many of the same scholars who had something to say about Lost had published on or taught DeLillo at some point in the recent past.  You might scoff and say that DeLillo is a popular enough author that there is no coincidence here, but when you add to this quasi-anecdotal evidence the startling fact that DeLillo’s most recent book, Point Omega, and the sixth (and final) season of Lost both debuted on the same day (February 2, 2010), you have a clue that neither DeLillo fans nor Lost fans – both practiced in teasing out the semantic nuances of manifestly meaningless coincidences – could possibly ignore.

Don DeLillo

A FUTURE FOR DELILLO IN LAW AND LITERATURE STUDIES?

MAY 17, 2018 PROFESSORDEROSA

Newsletter 4.1 (2009)

— Hunter Wakefield

Recently there’s been a small flowering of scholarship on DeLillo in the area of law and literature studies. Law Professor, Adam Thurschwell, has been the first scholar, to my knowledge, to ignite this inquiry into DeLillo’s relation to the law. His work has a superficial resemblance to that burgeoning group of legal scholars who have established themselves in the area of postmodernism and law. This group’s work usually flies under the name of Critical Legal Studies (CLS). Many among this group apply Derridean ideas to law in an effort to demonstrate what they see as the ultimate indeterminacy of legal rules and, as a consequence, the judge’s inevitable invention of the law on a case-by-case basis. More radical CLS scholars see the problem as twofold: either the judge applies fixed rules that have little purchase on the ungovernable singularity of the individual case; or the judge, theoretically, has no rule to apply and simply forces his own interpretation on the case at hand, and, in doing so, tailors a rule to fit the case. Because of what they read as a crisis of indeterminacy in law, many in the CLS movement are consciously political and look to ethical theories for guidance to legal reasoning. While Thurschwell—from what I’ve read—has never explicitly identified himself with CLS, he has written in publications heavily populated by CLS advocates. And in two recent articles, one on DeLillo and the other on Derrida, he appeals to Levinas’s ethics as a potential guide to the politics that steer legal decision making. Essentially, he reads a Levinasian “otherness” at the core of both DeLillo and Derrida.

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo: What I've Learned

The 100 best novels / No 98 / Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)

Paul Wilson
June 17, 2016

Comic books were the only thing I read as a child. I didn't come from a family of people who had a reading tradition, at least not in English. I lived in a very crowded house, but my Italian-American experience is not the Italian-American experience you understand from films and television shows you may have seen. You may have seen more of those than I have.

Don DeLillo on Tour / "They laugh in Chicago but no in Los Angeles"

Don DeLillo

“THEY LAUGH IN CHICAGO, BUT NOT IN LOS ANGELES”: DON DELILLO ON TOUR

MAY 10, 2018 PROFESSORDEROSA

The 100 best novels / No 98 / Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)

Newsletter 3.1 (2008)
— Julia Apitzsch, Bonn

DeLillo at the movies: Cologne’s Odeon Theatre provided a perfect venue to launch DeLillo’s third reading tour in Germany. Sponsored by the newspaper Die Zeit, the tour went on from Cologne to Hamburg and Berlin, before continuing on to Zurich, Switzerland.

A rare interview with Don DeLillo, one of the titans of American fiction

Don DeLillo

Q&A: A rare interview with Don DeLillo, one of the titans of American fiction

The 100 best novels / No 98 / Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)

By CAROLYN KELLOGG
APRIL 29, 2016

If you want to reach Don DeLillo, don’t try to email him; he doesn’t email. His preferred method of business communication is via fax. He still writes his novels on a typewriter.

That technological reticence notwithstanding, DeLillo is one of the titans of American fiction. The 79-year-old DeLillo is the author of 18 novels, including the National Book Award-winning “White Noise” and the acclaimed bestsellers “Underworld” and “Libra.” In 2004, in a high-profile get, the Ransom Center acquired DeLillo’s papers; in 2015, he was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

DeLillo in the Classroom / Teaching White Noise in Freshman Composition

DELILLO IN THE CLASSROOM: TEACHING WHITE NOISE IN FRESHMAN COMPOSITION

The 100 best novels / No 98 / Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)

MAY 24, 2018 

PROFESSORDEROSA

Newsletter 4.1

— Ryan Sandowicz

As I reflect on teaching White Noise in my freshman composition class, I mostly think of the analysis the novel receives by my students on the final exam.  One student’s thesis reads, “The media subconsciously regulates what they [The Gladney’s] define as real.”  Another reads, “The last chapter… speaks of youthful hope and optimism in regaining order and life under a toxic inspired sunset.” Though there are those thesis statements that drive less thoughtful essays, most students pick up on the themes in some capacity and tend to really understand how this book relates to their own lives.  It doesn’t start this way.  Invariably, since 2005, students initially and hopefully believe they are reading a book that was made into the 2005 movie White Noise. To help move my freshman English students from some typical groans about reading an unfamiliar work of literature not based on a movie to analyzing how a variety of the novel’s themes interact with each other and reflect meaningful contemporary issues, I use a teaching approach that inspires curiosity and challenges how and what they think about the way in which we live our own daily lives.

Don DeLillo / A Defense of Point Omega

A DEFENSE OF POINT OMEGA

JUNE 14, 2018 LAURENWHITEEE

The 100 best novels / No 98 / Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)


Newsletter 4.2 (2010)

—Paul Giaimo

In light of the recent extreme divergence of reactions as to the quality and value of Don DeLillo’s latest novel, Point Omega, here a defense of the novel is offered in terms of “liberal irony” an idea which finds its origin in the field of philosophy. Richard Rorty defines the liberal ironist in his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity as the writer for whom a “sense of human solidarity” is “ a matter of imaginative identification with the details of others’ lives” (Rorty 190). In terms of what we’ve called “the divided opinion” on DeLillo’s Point Omega, the book has been criticized for disabling the reader’s imaginative and compassionate identification with said details because it does not resolve its ambiguous plotlines and seems deliberately to avoid making concrete anti-Iraq war statements – for instance as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did against slavery in the mid-19th century through the use of traditional realist modes of plot and character which condemned the cruelty of slavery through clear portrayals of the same. But it is precisely the ironic strategy of Point Omega to subvert traditional identification with the novel’s details via omission. This strategy forces readers to look for imaginative identification between the sparse details he or she is afforded and significant conditions of the war itself. What we are given is the tragic and forever unexplainable disappearance of Jessie Elster, daughter of Bush-era Iraq mastermind Richard Elster, whose visit to her father provides a temporary respite from his visit with James “Jim” Finley, a documentary filmmaker who wishes to make an Americana-style soliloquy film of Elster as “a flawed character in a chamber drama, justifying his war and condemning the men who made it” (99). The narrative is abruptly truncated when the two return to find nothing left of the gentle Jessica. The inexplicability of her disappearance is complicated by the fact (amongst other causes) that the local sheriff is reluctant to suspect the house caretaker, the only other man to hold a key to Elster’s home where Jessie and the men were staying, because he has known this caretaker for 30 years (82).  Accountability and criminal investigation are obstructed, finally impassibly. As the novel ends with Jessie’s disappearance, the truth of her situation remains an unsolved mystery.