A review by wmbogart
Underworld by Don DeLillo

How the intersecting systems help pull us apart, leaving us vague, drained, docile, soft in our inner discourse, willing to be shaped, to be overwhelmed - easy retreats, half beliefs.

Underworld concerns itself with byproducts. Detritus. Fallout. Nuclear waste. Graffiti. Histories, embedded in corporate slogans. Objects and remnants and rooms, haunted. Magazines. Films. Memories. Box scores and rats and paranoia.

Sure, DeLillo often gets his own preoccupations and observations down and then backfills them into the novel’s larger structure. But it works. It does! It ties together, somehow. The connections are subtler than you might expect. And, as is typical with DeLillo, these connections are often delayed. In some cases, just an object or an aphorism can tie two strands together. But it all congeals. He pulls it off.

I mean, Pafko at the Wall? The invented Eisenstein film? The Texas Highway Killer? The Das Kapital epilogue? An embarrassment of riches here. I’d try to live in this text if I didn’t live in it already.

Some things fade and wane, states disintegrate, assembly lines shorten their runs and interact with lines in other countries. This is what desire seems to demand. A method of production that will custom-cater to cultural and personal needs, not to cold war ideologies of massive uniformity. And the system pretends to go along, to become more supple and resourceful, less dependent on rigid categories. But even as desire tends to specialize, going silky and intimate, the force of converging markets produces an instantaneous capital that shoots across horizons at the speed of light, making for a certain furtive sameness, a planing away of particulars that affects everything from architecture to leisure time to the way people eat and sleep and dream.

And.

There is something somber about the things we’ve collected and own, the household effects, there is something about the word itself, effects, the lacquered chest in the alcove, that breathes a kind of sadness - the wall hangings and artifacts and valuables - and I feel a loneliness, a loss, all the greater and stranger when the object is relatively rare and it’s the hour after sunset in a stillness that feels unceasing.