If you know me in real life, you would know that I’m not a big reader at all. Up until August 2011, in the eight years or so since my last English class, I read exactly one novel (Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher), and that one was technically a “young adult” novel that I finished in an afternoon sitting in Borders, back when it still existed.
So what possessed me to start reading Underworld, I’m not sure. I suppose I’ve always had this weird fascination with books and authors, like what these famous and acclaimed books were all about, but without the desire to actually read them.
This kind of felt like being one of those people who just watch video game replays on YouTube without actually playing the game (wait, I actually do that…). So I guess I decided that I would finally try reading one of these masterpieces. But where do I begin, in this vast jungle of literature?
In my numerous visits to Wikipedia, I frequently ran across references (at least in articles about books) to a list of the best books of the last 25 years, published in 2006. That seemed like a good place to start. Beloved topped the list, but the story of a woman killing her own child and then the child coming back to haunt her didn’t exactly sound uplifting to me. So I went with the second-place finisher, Underworld.
Yes, it is a daunting 827 pages long. And Don DeLillo doesn’t exactly have a reputation of being an easy-to-read writer, unlike some writers of vampire-themed teen love stories, for example. Nonetheless, it was supposed to be his masterpiece and a great American novel about the last half of the 20th century.
And so I read it. Not really being accustomed to reading on a regular basis, I read it mostly on plane rides, with an occasional chapter at night after work. Finally, after close to four months of intermittent reading, I finished reading it in a coffee shop I visited for the first time.
Do I think it’s a masterpiece? Well, it’s hard for somebody who’s read two books in eight years to really judge what a “masterpiece” really is. I mean, it’s well-written, for sure. DeLillo’s descriptions are incredibly vivid. Like in the prologue that describes a baseball game, I really could imagine the characters doing what they’re doing, and it was even entertaining to read. And I thought the first half of the book, even though it jumps around between characters and also goes backwards in time starting in the 1990s, flowed pretty nicely. But then, in the second half of the book, it seemed like the narrative kept jumping around a lot. Sometimes we were in a scene for less than a page before it jumped to a different place. I felt this more acutely in the second half of the book than the first. Maybe I was getting tired, or maybe I just started noticing this style after the first four hundred pages?
I wouldn’t say that I would go back and read all 827 pages again. There’s not really much of an overarching plot. There is a question introduced early in the book, about what one of the main characters did in his past, but there’s so many other characters that it’s not the primary focus of the book, really. So it’s not exactly an exhilarating book, more like a portrait of a bunch of different and interesting characters in New York throughout various decades of the 20th century. And DeLillo’s done that well, painting a colorful picture of New York City life. It’s just so damn long. It totally could’ve been edited down to a shorter book. So I thought it was a good, but not great, book.
I’m trying out The Road next. Hopefully, it won’t take me another four months to finish this one.