If the above line in Underworld recalls the nun in White Noise who pretends to believe because the nonbelievers need to believe in her belief, there is good reason for the similarity. Underworld represents a culmination for DeLillo, who brings the motifs and ideas of earlier works together through the texture of this much larger one. White Noise's comedy about technology and death resurfaces not only in Eric Deming, but also in the deadpan irony of Waste Containment, an enterprise devoted to designing landfills—a job that sounds simultaneously ridiculous and perfectly realistic. DeLillo has explored the connections between sports and the arms race before, too. End Zone's thematic linking of football and nuclear war finds its Underworld analogue in Marvin Lundy's observation that an atomic bomb's radioactive core is the same size as a baseball. While the underground research facility of Ratner's Star looks...