Underworld

DeLillo presents a striking, at times overwhelming, account of the twin forces of the Cold War and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples.

The incredibly elegant prologue of Underworld takes place during the 1951 Giants-Dodgers pennant chase. Written in a style that DeLillo refers to as "super-omniscience," the sentences follow a young Cotter Martin as he runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a sultry Jackie Gleason and a giddy Frank Sinatra, and finds out about the Soviet Union's second nuclear bomb detonation. This is a very exciting literary moment. The events of the following several decades are put in action, all knitted together by the baseball as it moves from hand to hand, when Bobby Thomson smashes Branca's pitch into the extended hand of Cotter—the "shot heard around the world"—and Jackie Gleason throws up on Sinatra's shoes.

DeLillo says, "It's all falling indelibly into the past," a history he painstakingly recounts and expertly reconstructs. In 1992, hop from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert, where artist Kara Sax and now-owner Nick Shay reconcile. DeLillo filters the Cold War experience mostly via the events, spinoffs, and chance meetings of their pasts—they had been short and unusual lovers forty years before. His belief is that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and throughout the course of the book's eight hundred pages, we see firsthand how such events affect people as the story travels back to 1951. By using a reverse narrative, the author is able to remove all traces of pop culture and history, leaving only the three essential components of the story—the baseball, the bomb, and the Bronx. DeLillo flash-forwards to a near future in which the mix of fear and joy that characterized the Cold War has been replaced by merciless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, subdued faith in an epilogue as thrilling and breathtaking as the prologue.

By combining disparate and entwined narratives, such as those of gangsters, highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspirators, nuns, and various other people, DeLillo skillfully crafts a delicate network of interconnected experiences, a collective Zeitgeist that beautifully captures the chaotic entirety of fifty years of American history.