Carl’s Reviews > Underworld > Status Update

Hyperlinks: I wonder if DeLillo styled this 1996 novel on the then-relatively new (first visual web browser was 1994, right?) idea of hyperlinking. Each character kicks off a new one, kind of a book version of the proverbial internet rabbit-hole.

More Coover-ian stuff: the wild cataloguing of flying objects—an urban litany, Whitman but sped up into the 20th century—blitzed out in polysyndetons and asyndetons and juxtaposition. Even the sexual images (Coover’s would have been humans, not a Brueghel painting) and the news. Such an astonishing capturing of intensity, of “a memory with protective power” (58).

Hugely evocative and energetic, making me think of Coover: the references to the Dodgers’ and Giants’ origins (Superbas and Bridegrooms) carries a flag reminiscent of the wildly underappreciated The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., while the congregation of world events in the opening chapter smacks of the Uncle Sam chapters of the similarly under-recognized The Public Burning.

Connections, connections, connections -- the bane (and wealth?) of the postmodern world!

Loving it. Wish I had more time for pleasure-reading...