1 sentence review: It's less than the sum of its parts.
On a page by page or sentence by sentence scale, the book is brilliant. The opening scene at the baseball game: fantastic. Each individual character and scene were well fleshed-out, and he came up with an interesting way to structure the book (essentially, the book moves backwards, but it still feels like you're moving forward). I like the concept here: where the reader, and the characters really, keep looking back into the past to find out where it all went wrong, so to speak. And it was an interesting study of America from the 50s up to the 90s -- the Cold War basically.
But it was like there was some glue missing that was needed to hold these 800 something pages together. I think maybe only a few people capture the sort of jaded, seen-it-all-before-so-now-what, emptiness of the 80s and 90s better than DeLillo, and indeed these are the most compelling and parts of the book, but I also think that he did a much better job with that material in White Noise. Around the 300 page mark the cohesiveness started to unravel and the pace plateaued. By the time you get to part 5 (around page 600 or so), which is made up of "Public Fragments from the 50s and 60s", I was exhausted and tired reading and felt annoyed, like my time was being wasted by my being forced to read several pages of Lenny Bruce material when all I really wanted to know was the missing link between the characters presented in the previous 600 pages. Maybe it was a case of trying to do too much, or of stubbornly sticking to a plan to write a massive 800 page novel when 300 or 400 would have sufficed. (aside: I kind of hate when people use this critique of books on, say, an Amazon review "It needed to be about 300 pages shorter" but, honestly, Underworld would have been better, I think, about 300 pages shorter).
I will say this, though: it may need to be a book that is read in large chunks, maybe 100+ pages at a time, in order to work as a cohesive novel. My reading was spread out over a month plus with not a lot of time and energy to dedicate to reading, but I still think there was something missing here.
