Vast in size, scope and, more importantly, imagination, you should not come here for straight A-to-B narratives. DeLillo is about documenting fifty disparate years of the personal and the political: 'Random energies that approach a common point.' Cold War and peace.

It starts with a legendary baseball game mounted in New York in 1951 - one won with a glorious home run known as the 'Shot Heard Around the World'. That's our point of departure. Or rather, the serendipitous news that, on exactly the same day, the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb: the second shot fired that day to circumnavigate the globe. The winning ball, caught by Cotter Martin, resurfaces again and again; less a McGuffin than a cursor to this history. Immediately after the prologue it belongs to Nick Shay, the closest thing we have to a hero:
'My firm was involved in waste. We were waste handlers, waste traders, cosmologists of waste.'
And that's what Underworld is really about: garbage and atoms.

The story is told backwards. At its opening Nick Shay motors out to the desert to view an art project where Klara Sacks tutors her students in repainting decommissioned US bombers. She and Shay had a brief affair when he was a young man in the Italian Bronx. We eventually visit her, and meet Nick's brother who worked out in the secret bunkers of the US atomic program. And further back still, through Vietnam, to the day after the game and the catastrophe that changed Nick's life:
Because everything connects in the end, or only seems to, or seems to only because it does.

To advance the analogy, the shockwaves of DeLillo's narrative implode from our immediate post-Wall angst, compacting in that plutonium-core baseball: 'All technology refers to the bomb.' A nightmarish epilogue takes us into a neo-sf world of ultimate waste, with 'downwinders' (the human freakshow fallout of nuclear testing), fake garbage ('They have perfected a form of simulated human waste in order to test diapers'), and Net-inspired religious fervour.

But it's not so much DeLillo's narrative sprawl as the detail that eats into our consciousness. And, paradoxically, it's on that level and that level alone that some could draw fault. Here and there we are forced to imagine this as some kind of a greatest hits package: here is the shot-vein paranoia of Running Dog; there the forensic Zapruder-madness of Libra (no one writes about Dallas 63 with quite the same eloquent disturbance); and now the sustained breathless anxiety attack of White Noise. But if DeLillo riffs on past tunes, it's because they are his riffs, his tunes; he speaks in his voice. In describing the workings of Matt Shay's job ('awed by the inner music of bomb technology'), or inventing new routines for Lenny Bruce, he is able to think us into these places. It's exhilarating writing.

Whole passages unfold with unsettlingly disconnected dialogue; people talk not just to one another, but across and against. DeLillo tells us we are not - never will be - safe. He makes us think that, for all that we have a recorded history, we are no closer to its understanding. 'You can't precisely locate the past,' someone says. 'Give it up.' But for his part, DeLillo has spent that past scratching away, always alert for the connection:
between a soup can and a car bomb, because they are made by the same people in the same way and ultimately refer to the same thing.
He is an unapologetic believer in such intangible truths.