Underworld by Don DeLillo

Published 1997 · 848 pages · 273,114 words · about 25 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is Underworld to read?

Underworld scores 64 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
DeLillo writes in precise, rhythmic prose that incorporates Cold War terminology, waste management, and the specific vocabularies of baseball, art, and America's hidden systems. The language is demanding but rewards attention.
Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
Sentences are often long and accumulative, building through the textures of American life across decades. DeLillo's prose creates rhythm through repetition and variation, tracking connections across time and space.
Abstraction: 65 out of 100
The novel explores waste, history, and the systems that connect American life through characters linked across fifty years, starting from the 1951 baseball game where the Giants beat the Dodgers on the same day the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb. The ball becomes a thread connecting disparate lives.
Information density: 65 out of 100
Cold War America, waste management, the Texas Highway Killer, and the textures of multiple decades layer through the massive narrative. DeLillo builds his portrait through accumulated attention to objects, events, and the systems that organize American life.
Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
The reverse chronology and multiple storylines require readers to track connections across time. The reader must piece together how characters and events relate while understanding the larger systems DeLillo reveals.
Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
The baseball becomes symbolic of America itself, passed through different hands. Waste becomes symbolic of what civilization produces and cannot escape. The bomb becomes symbolic of the apocalyptic undercurrent beneath postwar prosperity.
Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
DeLillo maintains cool, observational distance from American life, finding the profound in the mundane and the mundane in the profound. The novel is serious about history while darkly comic about how we live it.
Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
The narrative spirals backward and forward without conventional resolution. DeLillo offers the connections without claiming they explain America.
Structural complexity: 70 out of 100
The reverse chronology and eight parts spanning decades create extreme demands. The form requires tracking many characters and storylines across half a century.

How Underworld is regarded

Underworld holds a literary regard score of 85 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Underworld sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (489 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Underworld scores 80 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
Waste is a religious thing. We entomb contaminated waste with a sense of reverence and dread.
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal)
All technology refers to the bomb.
Mythos: Irony iv (tragic pathos) (irony iv)
The meatblood colors and massed bodies, this is a census-taking of awful ways to die.
Genre: Anatomy + Novel + Confession
They are trading garbage in the commodity pits in Chicago. They are making synthetic feces in Dallas.

Where the story of Underworld takes place

  • Polo Grounds, Harlem and the Bronx, October 1951 to summer 1952 (1951 to 1952), the main setting
  • The Polo Grounds, October 3 1951
  • Cold War America, 1952-1969: Lenny Bruce, Black & White Ball, blackout, Vietnam-era B-52s (1952 to 1969)
  • Manhattan rooftops and New Mexico weapons lab, summer 1974
  • Mojave Springs and Los Angeles, spring 1978
  • Texas Highway Killer era, Phoenix, Bronx and the Wall, mid-1980s to early 1990s (1985 to 1993)
  • Arizona desert and Phoenix, spring-summer 1992
  • Moscow and the Kazakh Test Site, mid-1990s (1993 to 1997)
  • Phoenix epilogue, late 1990s (1996 to 1998)

5 things that are true of Underworld, with the passage for each

  1. During the 1951 pennant playoff, J. Edgar Hoover is told that the Soviet Union has set off an atomic bomb.

    It seems the Soviet Union has conducted an atomic test at a secret location somewhere inside its own borders.

  2. Nick counts 230 bombers in Klara Sax's painted desert piece.

    There were two hundred and thirty planes, swept-winged, finned like bottom creatures

  3. Nick paid $34,500 for the baseball that may be Thomson's home-run ball.

    Thirty-four thousand five hundred dollars.

  4. Manx Martin sells his son's ball outside Yankee Stadium for thirty-two dollars and change.

    Thirty-two dollars and change.

  5. On a South Bronx billboard for orange juice, a murdered girl's face appears when train headlights sweep it.

    Because when the train lights hit the dimmest part of the billboard a face appears above the misty lake and it belongs to the murdered girl.

Scenes in Underworld that Frye would name

78 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Masque, untitled
They formed a death rank on the dance floor, halting the music and sending the guests to the fringes. Masked protesters stage a dance of death at the ball.
Hamartia, untitled
But first why would he point the gun at the man’s head? Nick's deadly dare with the shotgun is the fatal misstep.
Agon, untitled
It is a tight little theater of hands and arms, some martial test with formal rules of grappling. Cotter fights a stranger under a seat for the home-run ball.
Sparagmos, untitled
the afterbirth of face, the facial remains of what was once a head. George's shot head is rendered with a tearing-apart image.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Brian and Marian, whose names sound SO nice together, a good friend now and again, that he and my wife were partners in a deep betrayal. Nick's discovery of the affair pivots the Kazakhstan chapter.
Pathos, untitled
drags her up on the ledge and leans her over and lets her go. Esmeralda's murder is the book's central sacrificial death.

Books that share these scenes with Underworld

About the author

Don DeLillo