That such a book could come from a writer who has "never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never," seemed extraordinary. Underworld represented an expansion of talent that encompassed baseball, the bomb, the Cuban Missile Crisis, real people and invented ones, and left critics open-jawed in awe. "There is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great novelist," wrote Martin Amis. The epilogue of Underworld even reflects on the internet in a way that makes the metaverse seem like a twinkle in the author's eye. "Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around? Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure?" Not bad for 1997.
