Underworld

By: Don DeLillo

Narrated by: Richard Poe

Our lives, our half century.

Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome - the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World - shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb.

The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, generates the narrative that follows. It takes the reader deeply into the lives of Nick and Klara and into modern memory and the soul of American culture - from Bronx tenements to grand ballrooms to a B-52 bombing raid over Vietnam.

A generation's master spirits come and go. Lennny Bruce cracking desperate jokes, Mick Jagger with his devil strut, J. Edgar Hoover in a sexy leather mask. And flashing in the margins of ordinary life are the curiously connectecd materials of the culture. Condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs and miracle sites on the Web.

Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times - Don DeLillo's greatest and most powerful work of fiction.

©1997 Don DeLillo (P)2011 Simon & Schuster

Critic reviews

" Underworld is a page-turner and a masterwork, a sublime novel and a delight to read." ( The Baltimore Sun)

There's pleasure on evey page of this pitch-perfect evocation of a half-century." ( Newsweek)

"Masterpieces teach you how to read them, and Underworld is no exception." ( The Seattle Times)

Don Delillo's Best, Flawlessly read

Would you listen to Underworld again? Why?

Absolutely. In fact, I've gone back and re-listened to several chapters. It took me forever to get through this as I kept going back to savor passages.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Underworld?

The parts of a shoe, Matt's chats with his colleague at the desert lab, Clara Sax "ride" with her "childhood" friend, Nick's chat with his co-worker re: "dietrologia." DeLillo's overall fascination with language stirred me to many lookups. The sisters in the 'hood.

Which character – as performed by Richard Poe – was your favorite?

Like other male readers, he's weak on women. But his readings for Nick and the priest were my favorites.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

Just dread of the impending end. It's hard for me to break up with a book I love when I reach the end.

Any additional comments?

Just additional kudos to the reader. Nuance, accents (not overdone), Poe really evoked each character individually. His voice is narcotic with inducing sleep.

riveting storytelling

DeLillo's gift for vivid description is wonderful. He makes the scene come alive. His work is like Proust with a plot.

Great book and narration

Loved it. DeLillo is a master! Sprawling and engrossing tale that defies easy interpretation. Beautiful descriptive language.

Great storytelling, fluid prose, snappy dialog

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes. There are many different characters in this long novel and Delillo interweaves their stories brillianly. They keep popping up at unexpected and yet absolutely correct spots in the novel.

I don't know of another writer who writes better dialog than Don Delillo.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Underworld?

As another reviewer noted, the long opening set piece in the Polo Grounds during the final 1951 national league playoff game between the Giants and the Dodgers is truely great writing. Delillo's imagined banter among Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor, who in reality did attend the playoff game together, is very, very funny.

What does Richard Poe bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

There is a great deal of sparkling dialog in the novel and Richard Poe does an excellent job in giving each character his or her own voice. I especially enjoyed his rendering of Marv Lundy, the retired sports memorabilia collector. Almost everying that Marv says sounds off the wall, yet hilarious. You don't get the full effect without Richard Poe's voice inflections.

If you could rename Underworld, what would you call it?

I wouldn't rename it. I like Delillo's metaphor. No matter how deeply you bury nuclear or other toxic waste, eventually some of it is bound to rise to the surface. So too, no matter how far under the surface emotional pain and trauma is buried, it still has a great deal to do with what we do and who we are.

Any additional comments?

This is a great novel with snappy, yet absolutely authentic-sounding dialog.

Thank You

One of the peaks of contemporary literature, rendered perfectly by master narrator Richard Poe, who will always be the voice of Delillo for me. Thank you for bringing this beautiful work of art to life.

Complex

I found this novel to be a complex marathon of stories set in the second part of XX Century America. While the tread of the story seems to follow a set of characters, the truth is that there is no single story been narrated but a collection of them. Characters come and go as the book matures and then are lost in the maze of the timeline. I liked the book but I failed to grasp its greatness.

Delillo and King

Reminded me of King's The Stand. Found an article comparing Delillo's White Noise to King's Roadwork. As well an interview where Delillo lists King as a major influence.

Masterful performance of a masterpiece

Underworld is a great book, a sprawling nonlinear narrative encompassing the great themes of the second half of the 20th century in America portrayed in the intimate lives of many characters. I read it when it first came out, and recently decided to listen to it on a long road trip. This performance is mesmerizing, Richard Poe always sounds as though he's speaking the words, not reading them, with variations appropriate to the many different characters. The audio quality on this recording is top notch as well, all around a very well done audiobook, highly recommended!

I love this audiobook

This is probably my favorite audiobook. DeLillo's gift for language is truly special, and nobody writes like he does in this book, which has an almost jazz-like quality. On a sentence by sentence level, reading (or listening) to this book is a pleasure. The story is absorbing at times, and it's engaging to piece together the ways the various characters are connected to each other--but really it's not about the story. It's about following some characters through the second half of the 20th century, getting hyper-convincing, often moving peaks into their lives and characers, and hearing, through them, some fascinating and moving reflections on a huge variety of important topics. Richard Poe reads this superb writing beautifully, and his performance of this book made him my absolute favorite narrator.

I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys literary fiction. It's unforgettable.

They don’t make them like this anymore… and maybe that’s a good thing.

This is a sprawling epic. Maybe meant to be a masterpiece or maybe just ended up that way. The timeline is erratic and the connections, sometimes that only barely or superficially exist, are not always obvious and sometimes not very meaningful. The voice is very 20th century male macho. Hemingway vs Updike in dialing lingo of lost youth and the futility of admitting your futility. It feels there is a lot of autobiographical scaffolding underneath the prose. So many great lines… of both narrative and story. Not for the timid or easily intimidated. I read this in my 20s but listening to it in my late 40s I seemed to have FELT it more. Probably not for everyone, but then again, is there anything worth experiencing that is built for everyone?