This is the first book of Delillo's I have read. Underworld is a long book by any standards at over eight hundred pages but it is never boring. The basic story of a baseball used to score the home run in a legendary game that coincides with the first soviet testing of an atomic bomb is largely a great pretext to look at the second half of the twentieth century through American eyes. A novel that enables us to look through the eyes of so many people to render the historical significance of so much of the trappings of the last fifty years : condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs and miracle sites on the web. DeLillo introduces us to so many characters in teasing out this extraordinary panorama. J. Edgar Hoover, Lenny Bruce and Klara Sax a painter whose canvasses are decommissioned B52 bombers. There is no plot as such in this novel. No who done it or how was it done. This novel is a journey populated by these characters connected by the thread of the underworld, the everpresent threat of annihilation that is the result of the cold war.

A sea breeze blew through the room and the band was playing cha-chas now. A woman sitting down missed her chair. Dancers appeared at the far end of the bar, they were spilling out of the lounge, one-two cha-cha-cha, and Lenny rolled his shoulders and dipped his hips. The travel agents took a vote and decided to order another round. The music drilled the wall like tamale farts and a couple of college girls got up and danced in place among the crowded tables. The original dancers moved in a boxer's crouch, advancing down the bar in pastel skirts and white guayaberas while test missiles in California were reprogrammed with Soviet targets. Lenny seized the mike and cried, "We're all gonna die!"

Underworld is much more than a treatise on the psychological implications of living in America during the cold war. Its entry and exploration into so many people are superb examples of the writer's craft. In many ways I found this the most contemporary book I have read.

Jimmy was an edge seeker, a palmist, inferring the future out of his own lined flesh, but he looked at his hand one day, according to my little brother, and it was blank. And did he become, could I imagine him as a runaway eccentric? In a way yes, a man who doesn't wash or change his clothes, bummy looking, talks to himself on the street, and in another way, maybe, I could imagine him rising this high, soaring out of himself to produce a rambling work of art that has no category, with cement and chicken wire.

Underworld came highly recommended from a friend and I thought he may have been exaggerating but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it. Underworld is one of the finest books I have ever had the good fortune to read.