Novel: Underworld

Overview
Underworld is a sweeping, non-linear portrait of late twentieth-century America that orbits around the figure of Nick Shay and a single, enigmatic baseball. The narrative pulls together episodes across decades, from the tense atmosphere of the Cold War through the consumer-saturated late twentieth century, using everyday life and exceptional moments to trace how personal memory and national history fold into one another. The baseball itself acts as a connective object, gathering characters, chance encounters, and cultural anxieties into a single emblematic thread.

Plot and Structure
The novel unfolds as a mosaic of scenes and voices rather than a straightforward chronological tale. Episodes move back and forth in time to assemble Nick Shay's life, a man shaped by work in the waste-management world, by love and loss, and by an abiding sense of moral and emotional dislocation. Parallel strands follow other characters whose lives intersect around the ball and around sites of disposal and secrecy, producing a braided narrative that repeatedly returns to pivotal moments and refracts them through new contexts.
Rather than resolving every mystery in a conventional way, events accumulate as layers of meaning. Small domestic moments and large public incidents sit side by side: family quarrels and funerals share space with media spectacles, political fear, and the logistics of burying what a society discards. The baseball reappears at key junctures, an object whose trajectory binds together incidents of chance, ownership, and cultural myth.

Themes
Memory and forgetting are central concerns, explored both privately and collectively. Characters negotiate personal ghosts and communal amnesia as the novel traces how memories are stored, sanitized, or displaced. Nuclear dread and Cold War paranoia are never far beneath the surface, informing decisions about secrecy, containment, and the management of waste. That preoccupation with containment becomes literal through recurring scenes of rubbish, landfills, and the bureaucratic apparatus that processes what a culture deems expendable.
Sport and spectacle function as motifs for national identity, with the baseball standing for myth-making, ownership, and the ways public narratives are constructed and contested. The novel interrogates consumer culture, media saturation, and the aestheticization of death and ruin, suggesting that waste, material, emotional, and historical, shapes the American landscape as surely as any river or highway.

Style and Legacy
DeLillo's prose alternates between precise reportage and lyric rumination, moving through long, cumulative sentences and terse, austere passages. The book's structure favors resonance over resolution, inviting readers to make connections among recurring images and scenes. Shifts in perspective and temporal dislocations create a sense of cultural density: private lives are shown as embedded in larger institutional and historical systems.
Underworld has been widely regarded as one of the major American novels of its decade for its ambition and scope. Its blend of social critique, elegiac description, and formal experimentation has made it a touchstone for discussions about the relationship between the personal and the national, about how objects carry history, and about the moral questions posed by disposal, of waste, memory, and meaning.