Underworld

I wasn’t going to review this book, but a little time and distance broke down my resolve.
Delillo’s longest book is also one of my longest reads. With 100+ characters and covering a half-century there were many times I sat down, opened the book, and said to myself, “Why do I continue?” And the same answer always came to me: Delillo’s prose is captivating, even when the story is not. I could read nonsense all day long if he wrote it.
This book is like two mismatched bookends with a bunch of short stories in between them. The first bookend, a baseball game even I, notorious hater of team sports, knew about. It was an excellent start, but then we go adrift in a sea of disconnected stories in which Delillo seems to touch on every significant event of the latter half of the twentieth century, whether it is relevant to the storyline or not. It is then that I realized that there was no storyline, just a baseball of dubious authenticity connecting two bookends with a thin thread who will never realize the connection.
Anyone who has read the unabridged Moby Dick will recognize the style of diversion after diversion while the writer remembers that he has a book to get to the publisher. Anyone who likes Hemingway will love Delillo’s expressive prose.
Forget about keeping track of the characters. Main character? There isn’t one. Obstacles to overcome? Life. The insanity of MAD, of hiding under desks if a Russian nuke is on its way. I understood the futility of that as a ten-year-old.
Delillo missed a few of the aberrations of that era, but not many. Rock and roll , Woodstock, Black Power, cultism are a few, but I wouldn’t ask him for an update.
You may think I didn’t like this book by what I have said about it, but you would be mistaken. As a fictional look into that period in the US it is without peer and I highly recommend it. You will learn more about those years than any history
could accomplish in a dozen volumes because you will come away understanding how that period felt, but it takes a stoic to hang in to the end, and the end is worth the work required. I can’t wait for him to tackle this century.

A panorama that dissolves into a haze a fog.

I stumbled across this book when I did a Google search for "Best Cold War Novels." I had worked my way through most of the John LeCarre lexicon and had been disappointed by some stock Berlin Wall potboilers. This came back in the search and I was intrigued by the extent to which it purported to capture the mood of the country in the years from the 50s to the 90s -- the Cold War years through which I had lived (although only as an infant for part of the 50s). It was hard work at first to grasp the non-linear, non-chronological plot and character development, and it could have easily been shorter. But it did not disappoint. The characters were fascinating and the mood of those years was perfectly captured. It was well worth the work and a fascinating portrayal of America in the second half of the 20th Century. Beautiful prose and moments of real greatness.