until we get to the story's pure elements: The bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx.
In the breathless epilogue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria, and even baseball itself is changed.
Through fragments and interlaced stories û including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others û DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a messy overview of five decades of American life.
DeLillo has tried to create a novel that is everything the Cold War was. It is Korea and Cuba and Vietnam, oil embargoes and student protests and the arms race, civil rights and environmentalism and a world always in peril from some new quarter.
Underworld seems to be a novel cobbled and woven of pieces of popular culture, for many of its references and even characters are drawn from the world of the everyday life of Americans. But it is also a book that takes solace in high art, and two Flemish paintings come to represent important motifs in this novel that is fundamentally American, essentially about the American side of the equation that was the Cold War.
This referencing to the world of high art begins with the opening scene, in the opening baseball game where Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel's ôThe Triumph of Deathö flutters onto J. Edgar Hoover's lap, as the world is turned upside down by a nuclear explosion juxtaposed with an earth-shattering homerun. Hoover meditates on the landscape presented in this painting, the dead interacting with the living, the meaning of life understand only within the context of death, the necessity for understanding of the presence of both parts of an equation û us and them, the motherland and the enemy.
In fact two of BruegelÆs paintings hover like supernatural beings over the massive text of this book, both ôThe Tri...