Nick Calabrese’s Reviews > Underworld > Status Update

Finished last section before the epilogue. Young Nick sections are so good. The feeling of “oh my god why did I do that I shouldn’t have done that I can’t believe I did that” is done so well. And now there’s a lot I still remember happening in the last like 50 pages so I’m interested in how it’s paced. Unreal book.

A lot of really cool stuff coming together. A favorite is Nick noticing the bed in the woman’s apartment and then that it’s gone, and knowing Mr. Bronzini’s mother had died, and putting together that he’s slept with Bronzini’s wife.

Nick taking Matty’s hand and yelling for their mom to get hydrogen peroxide.

Rosemary’s section where the women call her the wrong name. “Who’s better than me, they said. This was a statement she couldn’t make, partly out of personality but also because she could not feel the ordinary contentment the way she used to. She could not feel favored or charmed… He’d replaced her life with his leaving… There was less of her now and more of other people. She was becoming other people”

Manx -> Charles Wainwright. Loop is closed for reader. Interested in seeing if it’s closed for the other characters. I can’t remember. I don’t believe it is. I hope it isn’t.

Lenny talks about a preacher who sees codes on dollars—same preacher as Manx. Nick narrating uses the word lonely, “for lack of a better word, but that’s the word in fact.” Throughout the novel people search for words and often feel they’re coming up short, though typically they’re correct. Theme Nick admitting (or not) things to himself (like when Marian cries in the car on the trip with the kids).

Liked Marian at home w/ parents, Charles Wainright Jr bomb run w/ long tall sally, lost baseball, simulated bomb blast, Matty wants to obey mom, since it’s just them two, and not gamble for pennies but w/ Nick upstate all the boys want to know him and it will be hard to say no when he’s dealt in.

I see how some people describe parts of the vignettes section as slow. I like the woman running home from her hospital shift, and J Edgar Hoover at the ball (and seeing Klara make a small appearance as a “middling painter”).

Small thought—I remembered Lenny Bruce being littered through the book and it turns out he only shows up for the first time around page 500. Granted there’s a good chunk of book left.

Love Matt in the desert in the bomb labs. Interesting in this section how there will be some argument about conspiracies where the characters are saying “this can’t be true” but it’s clear they think it probably is true, and then in the following sections with Klara at the movie the narrator overtly tries to convince us the movie is interesting before finally saying “admit it, you’re bored.”

First ~ half of the book is great. Good vibes, easy to pick up and read. Something about long books that often break into tons of short little vignettes. It’s nice when you’re just about done reading but then you realize you can hit another white space in just another page, so why not. Seeing a lot of connections between threads I didn’t see the first time reading it, which is always fun.