Underworld - Don Delillo (the end)

It is not normal for me to take almost two months to read a book, especially not one where I whipped through the first 300 pages with intensity.

The last 400 pages or so of Underworld, though, I found a bit of a struggle. Somewhere along the line, between all the flawed characters and entwined relationships and precariously teetering social worlds, I became disconnected. Rather than being involved, fly-on-the-wall style in the character’s lives, I felt a bit more like an editor – appreciating the prose in patches, keeping an eye out for segues between time and space changes, and critiquing the dialogue as I went. For an epic novel heralded by the who’s who of the literary world, I suppose I was expecting a bit more – maybe to be blown away even.



My problem, I think (and surely the problem is mine, since no doubt the book is as good as other people have said it is), is that I have probably arrived late to the party. With themes of how technology is changing our lives, how the Internet is connecting us in previously unprecedented ways even while we remain so physically disconnected, and how the pace of change in the world, universe even, is so rapid it is impossible to anticipate circumstances, reading this ten years ago would have probably been revolutionary. Now, though, I feel like these themes have been done to death.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy reading the book, I did. There are some great moments:

Take this description of telling a lie:

“Manx feels uneasy, he feels separated from what he’s saying – it comes out of his mouth like a lie, the way a lie hangs in the air independent of right and wrong, making you feel you’re not responsible.” p.359

Or this one of anticipation which reads like a scene filmed in one continuous take:

“Standing in someone’s kitchen, slicing a lemon, she understood that the knife would slip and she would cut herself and she did. It was one of those microseconds that’s long and slow and nuclear-packed with information and she knew it would happen and kept on slicing and then it happened, she cut her finger and watched the blood edge out from the knife line and slide unevenly down her knuckle”.p387

Moments of such exacting, quality prose are everywhere in the novel, and a pleasure to read.

What I will finish on, though, are some of the final words in the book which may help explain why I wasn't blown away; why I feel like I’ve been here, in the middle of this book, in the middle of these (admittedly still relevant) themes, before:

“Everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered and linked, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password – a world without end, amen.” p825