Underworld sports all the fittings of the Great American Novel: the length, the epic dimension, the complexity of its themes, and its entanglement with American history. Like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (although less experimental in language and content), Underworld constructs an almost anthropological representation of the fifty-year period between the Cold War and the Nineties. Don DeLillo manages to do so with nuance, coloring his writing with direct references to the filmic canon (most notably, the work of Sergei Eisenstein) and art history (the description of Peter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death is a perfect mise en abyme of the novel itself).

Resonating with everyday routine

Underworld mixes quotes, fictional and real characters, and a staggering number of references without ever losing its solid connections with contemporary issues. Waste storage, for example, or the unrealistic and frantic repetition of videotape that resembles the “unrealistic quality” of reality- c.f. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. 

In Underworld, a reader will find the History of significant events and personalities. Also, he will discover history without the “H,” the small one that resonates with the familiar and everyday routine. And language is the way through which this dual conception of history passes, the tool that allows us to imagine and see what is beyond “the official version.” For DeLillo, the word has great evocative power; the expressionistic chisel chips into the past. It’s an act of reshaping—finally, the mystery and beauty of the hundreds of individual experiences against the backdrop of post-war America.