Moe_Syzlak
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Garbage and consumerism; baseball, memorabilia, and collectors; marriage and infidelity; mafia hits and serial killers; the Cold War and The Bomb; Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra; fathers and sons; chess; graffiti; God and sex; J. Edgar Hoover and Gorbachev’s birthmark; Eisenstein and the Rockettes; Lenny Bruce and the Cuban Missile Crisis; us and them; The Shot Heard ‘Round the World and the number 13.
In 1951, a home run ball sends the Giants to the World Series as, simultaneously, the USSR conducts a nuclear test. How are these events connected? Or are they? In the 1990, our de facto main character Nick buys the baseball. Why Nick buys the baseball is one of the ideas that propels the novel. Though it is very difficult to say what the novel is about. People buy things to create an identity for themselves, but most of what they buy ultimately ends up in the "underworld" of a landfill (Nick is a waste management executive). Do people actually buy things out of need, or more out of loss, to fill the emptiness of their lives. It is also the wasted lives and the physical waste created by consumerism and the vicious cycle it creates: buy to fill a void and create more waste.
Throughout the book DeLillo makes connections between themes and storylines constantly reminding us that everything is connected, even if the how or why isn’t understood or driving a “plot” forward. Underworld is about the often unseen—but sometimes felt—undercurrents of the human experience.
At times, the book can be frustrating as storylines and characters I’d become invested in give way to smaller vignettes that held my interest less and seemed to force the connections DeLillo wants the reader to make. This is the downside of the non-linear storyline. It also doesn’t pay off with a climax that feels like it is all brought together. But maybe that’s not the point. In many ways the book will mean something different for every person who reads it. DeLillo isn’t preaching; he’s holding up a mirror and what you take from it will be very personal.
“Because everything connects in the end, or only seems to, or seems to only because it does.”