Donald Richard DeLillo was born in November 1936 in New York City and grew up in the Bronx’s ‘Little Italy’.

He graduated from a private Catholic high school and attended nearby Fordham University, emerging in 1958 with a degree in communications. While working as an advertising copywriter he began to publish occasional short stories, leaving his job in 1964.

He began writing his first novel, ‘Americana’, in 1966, but it wasn’t published until 1971. Further novels followed and, in 1975, he married Barbara Bennett, a former banker turned landscape gardener. In 1978 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and subsequently lived for a while in Greece.

With his eighth novel, the influential ‘White Noise’, published in 1985, he emerged as a leading light of late Twentieth Century American postmodern literature.

‘Underworld’ was published in 1997. It was his eleventh novel and his first since 1991 though, during this intermission, a version of the novel’s Prologue appeared , first as a short story and then as a novella.

‘Underworld’ is a sprawling treatment of American life in the second half of the Twentieth Century, coming in at over 800 pages and introducing more than 100 characters.

Many informed readers and critics cite it as a masterpiece, the broad consensus being that De Lillo’s subsequent work has not reached such heights.

I had never heard of DeLillo, but was seduced by the blurb on the edition I found in a charity shop. At the top it said ‘The No.1 International Bestseller’, which would normally make me return a book to the shelves pretty smartish.

But amongst those lauding ‘Underworld’ were such luminaries as Martin Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and Salman Rushdie, so I thought I would give it a chance.

The Prologue deals with a big baseball game in 1951, and what becomes of the ball that is propelled into the crowd for the winning home run. It falls initially into the possession of a young man called Cotter Martin.

Some of the characters at the game are real people – J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason – and Hoover also appears later in the novel. Several imaginary performances by Lennie Bruce also feature, dealing with the Cuban missile crisis.

Between the Prologue (The Triumph of Death) and the Epilogue (Das Kapital), some 800 pages later, the narrative is divided into numerous different sections.

There are six Parts, each covering a specified period, these periods dealt with in reverse chronological order.

They are: Long Tall Sally (Spring-Summer 1992); Elegy for Left Hand Alone (Mid-1980s-early 1990s); The Cloud of Unknowing (Spring 1978); Cocksucker Blues (Summer 1974); Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry (Selected fragments public and private in the 1950s and 1960s); and Arrangement in Gray and Black (Fall 1951-Summer 1952).

There are also three short sections interspersed in this sequence, each featuring Cotter Martin’s father, Manx Martin.

This results in such a complex montage of events that it can be exceedingly difficult to remember exactly where one is in space and time.

The two principal characters are brothers Nick and Matt Shay, whose childhood and youth in the Bronx presumably have some autobiographical features.

They were raised by their single mother, because their father walked out while they were children. Nick Shay accidentally kills a friend, subsequently spending time in juvenile detention. He eventually begins a career in waste management, winding up in Arizona. Matt, meanwhile, is a young chess prodigy who becomes a scientist working on nuclear weapons.

The central plot line concerns the complex sequence of events that delivers the historic baseball into Nick Shay’s possession, but there are also numerous sub-plots, certain of them unresolved.

The baseball dimension didn’t help me to judge this novel objectively since, in my opinion, the game is even more a waste of time than cricket.

I was also disinclined to enjoy the exclusively American ethos, given the ill will I currently bear that nation, on account of its deranged President.

On the other hand, some of the characterisation is powerful; some a little more hit and miss. There are several excellent though brief purple passages in which DeLillo ‘shows us his chops’. And the scope is, of course, hugely ambitious.

But it has taken me the best part of three (admittedly busy) months to complete ‘Underworld’ and, while I found it impressive in certain respects, I’m not quite sure it deserved so much time, or the attention I have lavished upon it, in an effort to understand and appreciate what I might otherwise have missed.

So my advice is only to read it if you’re prepared to engage much more than you’d engage with a typical novel.

I was prepared to do that for Joyce…but DeLillo is no Joyce, not by a long chalk.

TD

April 2026