One of the pages depicts Pieter Bruegel's painting 'The Triumph of Death,' presaging DeLillo's apocalyptic theme through the rest of the book. As the game ends, he's fretting over the implications of the news as pages of Life magazine drift down around him from the stadium seats above. Meanwhile, Hoover has been privately informed that the Soviets have set off an A-bomb test that very day. After a free-for-all scramble for the game-winning ball, Cotter winds up with the prize. The score is tied until the last minute, when Bobby Thomson knocks a homer into the stands off a Ralph Branca pitch, and the Giants take the pennant. Edgar Hoover and restaurateur Toots Shor. Also attending the game are Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, J. 3, 1951, to attend the final playoff game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. The sheer bulk of 'Underworld' may seem forbidding, but the introduction is deceptively simple: A kid named Cotter Martin skips school on Oct.

Like a character actor who absorbs the identity of each role, DeLillo disappears in his writing by creating a credible voice in each book, whether writing about rock stars, football, Lee Harvey Oswald or the Rev.

But DeLillo more than makes it work: 'Underworld' is his best novel and perhaps that most elusive of creatures, a great American novel.ĭespite his enormous critical successes ('The Names,' 'Ratner's Star,' 'Great Jones Street') and at least one best-seller ('Libra'), DeLillo seems forever poised on the brink of popular breakthrough.

It's hard to imagine anyone but DeLillo pulling off a conceit like this without hitting a meltdown of presumption and pomposity. For his 11th novel, Don DeLillo, whom some consider the nation's greatest living novelist, has written an 800-page story about a baseball.Ĭharting the ownership of the ball during the second half of the 20th century, DeLillo offers a millennial hypothesis: that a civilization is defined and destroyed, not (as prevailing theory has it) by what it creates but by what it throws away - from household trash and atomic waste to human values and lives.

Don delillo underworld cover