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Item Barcode | Collection | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Don DeLillo was born in the Bronx, New York on November 20, 1936. He received a bachelor's degree in communication arts from Fordham University in 1958. After graduation, he was a copywriter for an advertising company and wrote short stories on the side. His first story, The River Jordan, was published two years later in Epoch, the literary magazine of Cornell University.
His first novel, Americana, was published in 1971. His other works include Ratner's Star, The Names, Libra, Underworld, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, Falling Man, Point Omega, and The Angel Esmeralda, a collection of short stories. He won several awards including the National Book Award for fiction in 1985 for White Noise, the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992 for Mao II, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the inaugural Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Library Journal Review
On October 3, 1951, there occurred two "shots heard round the world"Bobby Thomson's last-minute homer, which sent the N.Y. Giants into the World Series, and a Soviet atomic bomb test. The fallout from these two events provides the nexus for this sagalike rumination on the last 50 years of American cultural history. DeLillo's opening depiction of the scene at the N.Y. Polo Grounds that day is masterly. Unfortunately, sustaining the initial brilliance proves difficult. There are some marvelously drawn charactersSister Edgar, a vision-seeking nun of the old school; Ismael, a ghetto-based graffiti artist and budding capitalist; J. Edgar Hooverand thought-provoking ideas, e.g., waste as the cornerstone of civilization and the power of remembered images lurking just beneath the surface of our minds. But somehow the various parts of the story seem more satisfying than the whole. DeLillo is one of our most gifted contemporary authors whose works belong in all academic and public libraries, yet one suspects that his truly "great" novel is yet to come. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/97.]David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| From Part 5, Better Things For Better Living Through Chemistry: Selected Fragments Public and Private in the 1950s and 1960s, Chapter 3, January 11, 1955 |
| We were about thirty miles below the Canadian border in a rambling encampment that was mostly barracks and other frame structures, a harking back, maybe, to the missionary roots of the order -- except the natives, in this case, were us. Poor city kids who showed promise; some frail-bodied types with photographic memories and a certain uncleanness about them; those who were bright but unstable; those who could not adjust; the ones whose adjustment was ordained by the state; a cluster of Latins from some Jesuit center in Venezuela, smart young men with a cosmopolitan style, freezing their weenies off; and a few farmboys from not so far away, shyer than borrowed suits. |
| "Sometimes I think the education we dispense is better suited to a fifty-year-old who feels he missed the point the first time around. Too many abstract ideas. Eternal verities left and right. You'd be better served looking at your shoe and naming the parts. You in particular, Shay, coming from the place you come from." |
| This seemed to animate him. He leaned across the desk and gazed, is the word, at my wet boots. |
| "Those are ugly things, aren't they?" |
| "Yes they are." |
| "Name the parts. Go ahead. We're not so chi chi here, we're not so intellectually chic that we can't test a student face-to-face." |
| "Name the parts," I said. "All right. Laces." |
| "Laces. One to each shoe. Proceed." |
| I lifted one foot and turned it awkwardly. |
| "Sole and heel." |
| "Yes, go on." |
| I set my foot back down and stared at the boot, which seemed about as blank as a closed brown box. |
| "Proceed, boy." |
| "There's not much to name, is there? A front and a top." |
| "A front and a top. You make me want to weep." |
| "The rounded part at the front." |
| "You're so eloquent I may have to pause to regain my composure. You've named the lace. What's the flap under the lace?" |
| "The tongue." |
| "Well?" |
| "I knew the name. I just didn't see the thing." |
| He made a show of draping himself across the desk, writhing slightly as if in the midst of some dire distress. |
| "You didn't see the thing because you don't know how to look. And you don't know how to look because you don't know the names." |
| He tilted his chin in high rebuke, mostly theatrical, and withdrew his body from the surface of the desk, dropping his bottom into the swivel chair and looking at me again and then doing a decisive quarter turn and raising his right leg sufficiently so that the foot, the shoe, was posted upright at the edge of the desk. |
| A plain black everyday clerical shoe. |
| "Okay," he said. "We know about the sole and heel." |
| "Yes." |
| "And we've identified the tongue and lace." |
| "Yes," I said. |
| With his finger he traced a strip of leather that went across the top edge of the shoe and dipped down under the lace. |
| "What is it?" I said. |
| "You tell me. What is it?" |
| "I don't know." |
| "It's the cuff." |
| "The cuff." |
| "The cuff. And this stiff section over the heel. That's the counter." |
| "That's the counter." |
| "And this piece amidships between the cuff and the strip above the sole. That's the quarter." |
| "The quarter," I said. |
| "And the strip above the sole. That's the welt. Say it, boy." |
| "The welt." |
| "How everyday things lie hidden. Because we don't know what they're called. What's the frontal area that covers the instep?" |
| "I don't know." |
| "You don't know. It's called the vamp." |
| "The vamp." |
| "Say it." |
| "The vamp. The frontal area that covers the instep. I thought I wasn't supposed to memorize." |
| "Don't memorize ideas. And don't take us too seriously when we turn up our noses at rote learning. Rote helps build the man. You stick the lace through the what?" |
| "This I should know." |
| "Of course you know. The perforations at either side of, and above, the tongue." |
| "I can't think of the word. Eyelet." |
| "Maybe I'll let you live after all." |
| "The eyelets." |
| "Yes. And the metal sheath at each end of the lace." |
| He flicked the thing with his middle finger. |
| "This I don't know in a million years." |
| "The aglet." |
| "Not in a million years." |
| "The tag or aglet." |
| "And the little metal ring that reinforces the rim of the eyelet through which the aglet passes. We're doing the physics of language, Shay." |
| "The little ring." |
| "You see it?" |
| "Yes." |
| "This is the grommet," he said. |
| "Oh man." |
| "The grommet. Learn it, know it and love it." |
| "I'm going out of my mind." |
| "This is the final arcane knowledge. And when I take my shoe to the shoemaker and he places it on a form to make repairs -- a block shaped like a foot. This is called a what?" |
| "I don't know." |
| "A last." |
| "My head is breaking apart." |
| "Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things. If they weren't important, we wouldn't use such a gorgeous Latinate word. Say it," he said. |
| "Quotidian." |
| "An extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace." |
| His white collar hung loose below his adam's apple and the skin at his throat was going slack and ropy and it seemed to be catching him unprepared, old age, coming late but fast. |
| I put on my jacket. |
| "I meant to bring along a book for you," he said. |
| Copyright © 1997 by Don DeLillo |