I don’t know this for a fact, but I have a hunch that Don DeLillo is and forever will be tickled that this novel will be known to a wider audience as the thing that inspired the rock band The Airborne Toxic Event.
If the dude never wrote Underworld this would have made a fine magnum opus – an epic howl at fucked up values and a culture trapped self-referential abstraction. I can’t say that these 325 pages have any real plot, nor can I say that the characters seem real or even approachable…yet the book is very readable and both funny and tragic. Magically, it is firmly a product of the mid-1980s, but isn’t dated in its themes. If it were written today, there’d be stuff in there about the Internet and cell phones. But that’d be the only difference.
DeLillo is certainly clever and if you blanche at clever writing you probably won’t like this too much. I must admit I found this a little off-putting for quite some time until I got into the rhythm of things. I recommend buying this for $3 like I did at some junk shop in New Jersey.
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