Underworld
In a sentence, it’s a story about a baseball, a guy from the bronx, America during the cold war, and waste. The first chapter is most of the story about the baseball, and it’s excellent. Either it was turned into a novella after Underworld was published or it was a novella that Underworld was built around. It describes in astonishing detail the home run hit by Bobby Thompson to win the national league pennant in 1951. I couldn’t put it down.
That first chapter exemplifies my impression of the book, that it is extremely well-constructed. The characters are interesting and deep, and the descriptions are rich if sometimes over the top. It’s a solid novel, you see where it’s going and it takes you there with the inevitability of sunrise after dusk, the methodicalness of a marathoner.
This inevitability, however, eventually became ponderousness and the backwards timeline ended up detracting from the novel. Delillo fell victim to his own writing talent. The beginning sections of the book were so well written and so engrossing, I wanted to know what happened next. But instead, I had to read 700 pages of why it happened, the backstory. There’s something of a reprieve in the epilogue, set in the present, but it’s not much of a payoff. While it is interesting to see the years of a character’s life peeled away, it certainly wasn’t as engrossing as it might have been.