“Underworld” Revisited

In 2006, Don DeLillo’s masterwork “Underworld” was named the second-best work of American fiction of the past 25 years by consortium of writers, critics, and editors, topped only by Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” Reading “Underworld” in light of the recent North Korean rocket launch makes the novel feel more timely than ever. DeLillo’s prose has retained its infinitely giving qualities—poetic with an energy that most writers would have trouble sustaining for the duration of a short story, much less 827 pages of well-tooled novel—blending the emotional with the journalistic for an overall effect that feels like a history-defining event on par with the moon landing, Kennedy assassination, or fall of the Berlin Wall. “Underworld,” incompletely described, at best, as a chronicle of half a century of personal and public lives as defined by waste (literal and figurative) and misdeeds, is gripping in its intensity and astonishing in the scope of its reach. And yet, the novel also feels unfinished, in the end, for the number of threads that have been woven into the fabric of the narrative. Chalk it up to the postmodern deconstruction of traditional forms or just DeLillo’s authorial choices about which areas of the novel should be shaded and which left untouched, but “Underworld” leaves many reader curiosities unsated. Yet as we grapple with the indeterminate consequences of North Korea, the restless sense of questioning may be the most accurate catalog of a political and cultural response to nuclear weapons that exists in fiction. If a book can be paired to the milieu of the time like a fine wine to a dish, then “Underworld” could be exactly what we need right now.