Underworld
It was difficult to envisage how the book’s surreal dialogue about mortality, supermarkets, Nazis, Elvis, drugs and car crashes could translate to the screen , that I blew a chunk of student loan on travelling to New York to see DeLillo discuss it on a freezing night in February 2001. In his Italian-American Bronx accent, he slowly read aloud from the book’s beautiful prologue, weighing each word and sounding, to my provincial English ears, like Robert De Niro.
Baumbach channels the promise of the novel’s opening into an energetic sequence, with Jack visibly buoyed by the arriving young people. He savours beginnings and fears endings, as does Babette, and together they wonder: “Who will die first?” In a scene that is not taken from the novel, Jack accidentally drives his family into a river during the Airborne Toxic Event