First Impression Friday will be a meme where you talk about a book that you JUST STARTED! Maybe you’re only a chapter or two in, maybe a little farther. Based on this sampling of your current read, give a few impressions and predict what you’ll think by the end.
Synopsis:
Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life; she is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep, clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times – Don DeLillo’s greatest and most powerful work of fiction.
It’s the end of the workweek—yay! I hope the week has been kind to everyone and that you’re all ending it on a high note. Just like that, we are already in the tenth month of the year. The previous month has been quite a ride, and I expect the coming months to be just as eventful. I am still adapting to my new job and environment, but everything has been going well. I am also learning the ropes, although I feel like I can pick up where I left off. September was a great month for me, and I hope the rest of the year will be just as good. But how time flies! Time takes its natural course, with little regard for any of us. As the year approaches its inevitable close, I hope everyone is rewarded for their hard work. I hope everyone will be showered with blessings and good news. With the weekend finally here, I hope everyone has a great one. It’s time to dress down and spend the long weekend resting from the rigors of a demanding career, pursuing your passions, completing household chores, spending time with loved ones, or simply relaxing.
October, then, is brimming with hope. I have a new job that is less stressful than my previous one—or at least, I hope it will be. For the first time since I started working, I am heading my own unit. So far, October has brought fine weather, in stark contrast to the relentless rains of August and early September. Still, fear lingers as the prospect of a super El Niño threatens the entire country. Unfortunately, forecasts suggest that it could wreak havoc over the next six months. I hope these forecasts are off the mark. Regardless, wherever you are in the Philippines or elsewhere in the world, I hope you’re all doing well—physically, mentally, and emotionally. Anyway, with the end of the workweek comes a fresh First Impression Friday update. In September, I crossed the Pacific from my previous literary venture into Asian literature. I am now in the midst of a literary adventure across the vast landscape of American literature.
American literature has been a staple of my annual literary journey. Given how readily available works by American writers are, I suppose one can never escape them. I also realized that I have several works of American literature on my ongoing reading-challenge lists. Since I still have several unread works by American writers on my reading lists, extending this journey into October is a no-brainer. My current read, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, is on my 2026 Top 26 Reading List. Like many of the writers whose works I have been reading over the past few years, DeLillo was first brought to my attention by must-read lists. Interestingly, DeLillo has long been part of the conversation surrounding the Nobel Prize in Literature. This week, however, the Swedish Academy recognized Canadian poet Anne Carson for the prize. Some of DeLillo’s works have also been included in the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die lists.
Among the works included in the aforementioned list is Underworld, which is also the second DeLillo novel I have read. Originally published in 1997, Underworld opens with a prologue that recounts how a young Black boy named Cotter Martin attended a National League baseball game between the New York Giants and their rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers. The scene is a fictionalized account of the Shot Heard ’Round the World, the home run Bobby Thomson hit on October 3, 1951. The home run secured the National League pennant for the New York Giants against their cross-town rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers. In DeLillo’s account, Martin caught the game-winning ball. Among the spectators that day was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who was informed during the game of the second Soviet atomic bomb test. Martin then ran home with the ball in hand, hoping to keep it as a memento of this memorable day.
Martin’s father, Manx, however, had other ideas. The family was struggling financially, so Manx took the baseball without his son’s permission, intending to sell it to help make ends meet. The story then moves to the early 1990s, when the novel shifts its focus to Nick Shay, its main protagonist. Nick is the man who eventually ends up with the baseball. However, nobody believes his claim that it is the ball hit during the Shot Heard ’Round the World home run. When we first meet him in 1992, Nick is living in Arizona. He is a waste-management executive married to Marian, but their marriage is unhappy. Nick has been unfaithful, and Marian is having an affair with his colleague and friend, Brian Glassic. At the beginning of the story, Nick drives across the desert in search of an artist named Klara Sax, who is famous for repainting abandoned military aircraft.
Nick then visits an art installation featuring B-52 bombers that Klara and her team are painting in the desert. We also learn that forty years earlier, Klara and Nick had a brief but memorable affair. Nick is ecstatic to discover that she still remembers him. Through flashbacks, we learn that his life changed when, as a teenager, he accidentally shot a man. Nick was also deeply affected by his father’s abandonment of the family when he was young. His father disappeared after going out to buy a pack of Lucky Strikes. As Nick grew older, he preferred to imagine that his father had been killed by the Mafia. I have just finished the novel’s first part and am about to begin the second. Apparently, the novel is divided into six parts and unfolds in reverse chronological order.
With more than eight hundred pages, Underworld is quite a lengthy read. It is among my longest reads this year and is considerably thicker than Cosmopolis, the first DeLillo novel I read. This means I have plenty of opportunities to appreciate and better understand DeLillo’s body of work. I am looking forward to getting to know Nick better. I am also curious to find out whether Martin’s father actually sold the baseball and, if he did, whether the sale helped the family financially. I am equally eager to discover how the baseball, assuming it is authentic, eventually ended up in Nick’s hands. Still, I suspect the novel is about much more than a baseball. With more than six hundred pages to go, there is still so much to unfold and unravel, and I expect DeLillo to explore a wealth of ideas along the way. These are some of the questions I look forward to exploring as I delve deeper into the book this weekend.
How about you, fellow readers? What are you reading this weekend? I hope you’re enjoying your current book.
