SOURCE: “Shots Heard 'round the World,” in American Book Review, Vol. 19, No. 2, January, 1998, pp. 20, 22.

In the following review, McLaughlin assesses the narrative structure of Underworld, outlining combinations and juxtapositions of characters, historical events, and ideas that comprise the novel.

We seem to be in a new age of big postmodern novels: Gass’s The Tunnel; Wallace’s Infinite Jest; Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon; and now Don DeLillo’s ambitious exploration of the second half of the American Century. Underworld. And Underworld is a big novel: big in its cast of characters, big in its historical sweep, big in its themes—baseball, the cold war, the uses and abuses of the past, waste in all its forms. It’s big, too, in what it accomplishes. Underworld masterfully brings together its characters, historical events, and ideas, putting them in surprising and challenging combinations and juxtapositions as a way of exploring...