Underworld, by Don Delillo, 1997

Some novels are easy reads – the pages roll past in a blur, the events have a pace and unity that keep you turning the page, but the reader sometimes feel a bit of a passenger, riding the tide of the novel without having to do any work. Chapters are as short as the reader’s attention span, and when the novel is put down at night it can be picked up again at any time without the need to remind oneself where one left off. ‘Underworld’ is the precise opposite of that kind of novel. It is complex, dense, extremely long (832 pages), and peopled with a large cast of characters. The narrative voice is evasive, jumping from character to character, and often it is not until well into a paragraph that there is any clue as to who the “I” is – and the very next paragraph it could change once again. The language Delillo uses is fractured and often very poetic; his characters usually speak in incomplete sentences, and there is often no indication who is speaking. The time structure of the novel is equally fragmented, and the jumps in time are mirrored by jumps around the globe. This all adds up to a challenging novel, from many different aspects – but the question is, was it worth it?