Delillo's Underworld

A year it had dozed on my shelf or on my floor, grey-grey, consuming
the immediate space to its left and to its right. Briefly halting the
steady-Eddie scan of my eye - from left to right or from right to left
- from time to time.

It was eight hundred and twenty seven pages long.

I read it on the bus or on the train or at my desk with a white plastic
coffee cup. Number 53. Strong. Douwe Egberts. White with sugar. The
woman from the other desk asked me what I was reading and said is it
any good and said we are going to have lunch and said do you want to
come?

It was eight hundred and twenty seven pages long with seven hundred and
eighty one pages of character introduction.

The woman from the other desk was from Peru, Indiana. And she lived in
what she called an 'affordable' bungalow' with a man who she said was
her 'dear other half'. His first name was a name that was Jules or
Julian or Julius. He was an electrical engineer and maybe I'll write a
bit about his mother and the nun who taught him to read at school. She
really has nothing to do with anything but it would make me a clever
and interesting writer - a storytelling genius, in fact - and so would
repeating random little sections of text and willful placing of the
word 'and'.

It was eight hundred and twenty seven pages long with seven hundred and
eighty one pages of character introduction. And after those seven
hundred and eighty one pages were finished I simply didn't care about
the characters.

I looked out of my dusty-musty window and I had to force myself to read
on. And the ending?

Peace.