Don DeLillo's Underworld.

Did start it, got waylaid and never got back to it. It's still sitting there waiting. However, I do remember the baseball scene at the beginning as wonderfully written. You've given me the push to return to it soon, i think.

I find it helps me reach the other far more interesting books on the upper shelves. His "White Noise" was an absolute classic, and a much more civilised length.

Loved it - especially the long opening section at the ball game and the Bronx scenes. Christopher Bigsby carries an interview with him in 'Writers in Conversation - Volume 1' (recommended read, people), in which DeLillo says: "When I started work, I had no idea I was writing a novel. I didn't know WHAT I was writing - a short story (!), a long story or a short novel, and when I began to draw near the end it occurred to me, finally, that perhaps this piece of writing, which was bringing me quite enormous pleasure, wanted to extend itself into a much longer narrative. I then followed it where it took me.... It emerged slowly, gradually, and what may seem obvious to the reader often struck me with the force of enormous revelation. When I started writing Part One of the book, the part that immediately follows the prologue, I started it on the day after the ball game ends. The prologue is an extended description of the ball game itself, so I was still in 1951 when I started work on Part One, on the novel proper, and I realised, after three to four weeks, that while I was not exactly making a drastic mistake I WAS following convention. It then struck me that perhaps I needed to do something radical and what I did was to allow the narrative to leap forty years into the future, into the early 1990s, and this, in turn, led me to work backwards. In other words, I was writing a novel, creating a structure, a piece of architecture, in which the narrative would move from the 1990s back to the very beginning of the book, which is 1951." The whole interview is a fascinating insight into method - and into the initial inspiration for the novel: two juxtaposed newspaper headlines. BTW, Spack - you did mean 20th century America. The novel was first published in 1997. Carries many resonances into this century, though. How about 'A Suitable Boy' now? Or 'Clarissa'?

Now "A Suitable Boy" was FANTASTIC! I read that when I was a newbie graduate in a temporary job. They spent all day ignoring me, so I decided to repay the compliment. I was about 20 pages from the end when they finally noticed I hadn't done any work for a month. I finished the book on the bus after they sacked me.

YES!!!! I loved it. It was a soap opera in a novel - I just wanted to know what happened next all the time!

Sorry Spack - got tempted to talk about A Suitable Boy instead. I started Underworld and got very bored very quickly. Even the famous baseball beginning I found dull. I had a lot more time on my hands then than I do now, so I don't think there's any chance of me ever reading it. I can see that he was trying to do, but I just don't think I want to spend that much time on a novel.