SOURCE: “DeLillo’s Surrogate Believers,” in Commonweal, Vol. 124, No. 19, November 7, 1997, pp. 19–22.

In the following review, Elie highlights the religious connotations of the language, themes, and imagery of Underworld.

The reviewers of Don DeLillo’s eleven novels have called him many things: a “systems novelist,” the chief shaman of the “paranoid school of American fiction,” a cultural critic who works in the form of the novel. Now he is being called one of the immortals. In the New York Times Book Review, Martin Amis, ducking the question about the new book, put DeLillo up where serious readers have placed him for years. “While Underworld may or may not be a great novel,” Amis wrote, “there is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great novelist.”

No one as far as I know has called DeLillo a religious writer. Nevertheless, religious language, themes, and imagery are thick on the ground...