Underworld by Don DeLillo
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I listened to the audiobook version of this book, narrated by the same guy who narrates the Jack Reacher series, by Lee Child, incidentally. He does a good job reading this book, which I’d been meaning to read for a long time, ever since I saw ads for it back on the subway in New York back in 1997/1998, Don Delillo being one of the great white giants of literature.
While I liked White Noise, which I read a long time ago, I couldn’t help but feel a great portion of this book was like an author’s exercise in onanism — adjectives spurting out needlessly, constantly, extravagantly; the almost verbatim transcript of a Lenny Bruce act was painful, drawn out; mansplaining before mansplaining was even a thing.
Thanks to the miracle of audiobooks, I was able to speed it up to try and get through it, and I’m sort of glad I did — the ending was a good little gut punch, but I have to wonder if it was worth the slog through the rest.