Underworld
Joyce Ravid (author photograph) New York: Scribner, 1997. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. 827, [3] pages. Signed and dated by the author on the fep. A monumental work combining fiction and history in a collaboration that encompasses fifty years gives readers a glimpse into the realities upon which America's modern culture is based and explores the complex relationship between "waste analyst" Nick Shay and artist Klara Sax. Donald Richard DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, politics, economics, and global terrorism. DeLillo was already a well-regarded writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and won him the National Book Award for fiction. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist (for Mao II in 1992 and for Underworld in 1998), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II in 1992, won the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, was granted the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013. DeLillo had described his fiction as concerned with "living in dangerous times",[3] and in a 2005 interview he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us." Underworld went on to become DeLillo's most acclaimed novel to date, achieving mainstream success and earning nominations for the National Book Award and the New York Times Best Books of the Year in 1997, and a second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination in 1998. The novel won the 1998 American Book Award, the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, and both the William Dean Howells Medal and Riccardo Bacchelli International Award in 2000. It was a runner-up in the 2006 New York Times' survey of the best American fiction of the last 25 years. White Noise and Libra were also recognized by the anonymous jury of contemporary writers. DeLillo later expressed surprise at Underworld's success. In 2007, he remarked: "When I finished with Underworld, I didn't really have any all-too-great hopes, to be honest. It's some pretty complicated stuff: 800 pages, more than 100 different characters—who's going to be interested in that?" After rereading it in 2010, over ten years after its publication, DeLillo said that rereading it "made me wonder whether I would be capable of that kind of writing now—the range and scope of it. There are certain parts of the book where the exuberance, the extravagance, I don't know, the overindulgence....There are city scenes in New York that seem to transcend reality in a certain way." Derived from a Kirkus review: Working at the top of his form, DeLillo draws on his previous novels in shaping his most ambitious work yet, a grand Whitmanesque epic of postwar American life—a brainy, streetwise, and lyrical underground history of our times, full of menace and miracles, and humming with the bop and crackle of postmodern life. DeLillo's bottom-up chronicle is the history of garbage, from a rubble-strewn lot in the Bronx to nuclear waste dumps in the Southwest. And the true-blue American who spans these landscapes is one Nick Shay, now an executive with a waste-management firm, once a j.d. on the not-so-mean streets, where his father kept book and his mother worried her rosary for her two boys, the other a chess prodigy who later lends his mathematical genius to the weapons industry. From the '50s on, DeLillo's always accessible narrative is also the history of a baseball, the one that was the "Shot Heard Round the World," Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning home run in 1951. The fate of the actual ball, a relic of spiritual significance, seemingly lost, is also a lesson in enterprise. Snagged by a young black kid from Harlem, who identifies with Thomson's Homeric homer, the ball quickly becomes an object of commerce, purloined by the boy's desperate father. Eventually, Nick acquires it, but for him it more properly commemorates failure: Branca's losing pitch. Beyond garbage and baseball, DeLillo surveys the Cold War years with a satirist's eye for meaningful detail and a linguist's ear for existential patter. Sweeping in scope and design, incorporating such diverse figures as Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover, DeLillo's masterpiece shouts against the times in the language of the times: postmodernism against itself. He kicks the rock of reality, teases out the connectedness of things, and leaves us in awe. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Nick Shay, Waste Management, Baseball, Bobby Thompson, Home Run, Branca, Cold War, Lenny Bruce, Edgar Hoover, Postmodernism, Klara Sax
ISBN: 0684842696
[Book #85173]
Price: $275.00