_Underworld_by Don DeLillo

According to Harold Bloom, Underworld is along with Blood Meridian and one other novel, Gravity's Rainbow (?) The Recognitions (?), one of the three greatest of America's post WW II (?) novels. (I'm not sure of the exact categorization...At any rate, one of America's three most highly regarded.) So I had to read it, and my initial reaction is, "I don't know about that..."

I'm not a particular fan of fictionalizing real people; DeLillo fictionalizes J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Lenny Bruce, and maybe one or two others. (I had to read quickly as the 800 plus page-novel was a library loan.) Of those real, famous people, the depiction of Lenny Bruce kept me absorbed, which is to say that the other depictions didn't.

The main character is Nick Shay (if memory serves), a boy who grows up without a father in Bronx, New York, falls in love with a woman about 20 years his senior, kills a man for which he is incarcerated (as a juvenile delinquent), and who, in spite of all, manages to make something of himself, getting married to a woman more or less his age, siring a daughter, and landing a lucrative, stable job in the toxic waste disposal industry. And that's about all I recall of the novel, and I'm not even sure if those recollections of mine are all that accurate. As I said, "I don't know about that...Harold Bloom's assertion that Underworld is one of the three greatest of America's post WW II novels."

Image Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/books/don-delillos-underworld-still-holds-power.html