Customer Reviews

End Zone

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This very early product from the mind of DeLillo is sharp with the kind of ideas DeLillo would go on with, though not always successfully. His characters in this book are both base and philosophical, and the narrator, Gary Harkness, is a man who is into both the visceral thrills of football and world destruction as well as the higher functions of meaning and love. DeLillo mixes the base grunts of football with the war philosophy of Sun Tzu, and this book maintains that level through short, precise explosions of thought and action. While other books like _The Names_ tend to talk more about philosophy rather than exemplify it, _End Zone_ is a surgical airstrike in itself, and well worth the read.

"End Zone" is like a Delillo primer: it introduces and develops his major themes, gives a taste of his absurd, over-the-top dialogue, and treats its genre conventions playfully. A football novel, "End Zone" is hardly a football novel- its a football-as-ritual novel, and as such it's about conceptions of identity and nuclear anxiety, and how language develops and even designates the forms of both these things. Delillo is concerned with language first- always- and how it shapes the stories we tell that make up who we are. This is about language as a distancing device used to subvert the passage to death. Which, come to think of it, is what pretty much all his books are about. In fact, "End Zone" is such a concise introduction to Delillo that I'd pretty much demand that anyone wisheing to read his stuff start here. It'll make the others much, much easier.

"End Zone" is packed with scenes of men shouting in elaborate code languages and with obvious symbolic tableau. Which is fine. Delillo is rarely a realist, and he's never one here. He's diagnosing the human condition down to the moment and the place. His books might leave America but they're always about this country, and "End Zone" is no exception. It's a visionary novel, and a fine one at that.

It's also very, very funny. It's pretty much a comedy from beginning to end- and it's a good one. Delillo is always humorous, but rarely is he half as funny as he is here on nearly every page. "White Noise," which is extremely funny at times, has nothing on "End Zone"- this book has the distinction of containing the funniest and best sex scene I've ever read. Every sentence in the scene is an ironic bombshell, all eroticism and absurdism brilliantly commingled. But, as always with Delillo, the laughter may sometimes get stuck in the throat; his books are, invariably, about our shared national tragedies, and they never fail to chill one to the very core of one's being. Scenarios of mass death are described in almost perverse detail by the characters in this novel. It's the only Delillo novel to have made me queasy; it may have even numbed me in its entertainment of horror. And this in a book that never has a character die on the page.

"End Zone" is a fine novel- powerful, thought-provoking, and hilarious. It runs on a finely tuned thematic engine, and has devastatingly precise prose. Had Delillo not written "The Names," "White Noise," "Mao II," "Underworld," and "Libra," "End Zone" would still be a 20th century American classic.

End Zone gives us Don DeLillo in his element, commenting on the American condition through one of its most indellible pasttimes, college football, and with hilarious results.

Pulling from his world of unique characters we are presented with a narrator at his third college in as many years, deep in the heart of Texas, and obsessed with nuclear holocaust. The metaphor of football as war is easily addressed but this story is driven by the quirkiness of its offbeat oddball football players and insane collection of coaches.

The predominatly white, southern team is shaken up with the addition of a potential All-American black running back and their head coaches' desire to retain the gridiron glory he once had. The coach has an undeniable Paul Brown/Woody Hayes quality to him.

The team struggles with each game, their individual neurosis and each other as the country lives in the paranoia and gloom of the nuclear menace.

Without a doubt some of DeLillo's most humorous writing while keeping the aura of his fiction in tact.

I loved this book. It's odd in a number of ways, all of which I liked a lot, though I imagine they might turn off other readers. First, it's about football and it really gets into the mechanics of the game. Non-fans might feel a little left out reading a four or five page description of a team's 60-yard drive. These scenes are gritty and journalistic; you get a real sense of it. Then there's the loopy conversations of the players. They're all at a football school in the desert, suffering in the sun, running and wrestling on the hard dusty fields. In their spare time they have earnest, sophisticated discussions about the nature of existence. Not realistic, but the combination completely worked for me at a metaphorical level. Hard work, hot sun, hard thinking, fights. Isn't that just what we all want?

Certain football fans may be left dissatisfied with Endzone. A football book that is not really about football at all, DeLillo uses the adventures of Logos College fullback Gary Harkness as a point of departure from which to explore aspects of post-structuralist systems theory that became his trademark in later books. DeLillo's study of the polysemous nature of language in relation to meaning is first-rate. The parallel he establishes between the jargon of football and nuclear war demonstrates how the deterioration of semiotic meaning within language can threaten personal creativity and individuality. Caught in this suffocating network of interlocking symbol systems, Gary finds in football the only means by which to express himself freely and independent of the sterile reality around him. For Gary, football is an end unto itself, whose jargon and primitive physical contact provides him with an alternative system of meaning away from the ascetic chaos of the postmodern world. In this way, DeLillo underlines the inherent value both of physical activity and verbal creativity as expressions of individuality, which rise above the constraints of a language system devoid of expressiveness and order. An oblique and thoughtful novel, Endzone may enthral you - but only if you have the inclination. Those of you, however, who are neither literature students nor semiotic theory enthusiasts, may find it tiresome, pretentious, or just plain dull.

I couldn't agree less with the reader from Boston, MA. "End Zone" is about as unified a book as you're likely to read. It is quite obviously a parable with football standing in for nuclear war. As such, it is impossible to break it down into several component stories. There is an obvious beginning, middle and end: you have the arms build-up and the machismo of the preparation for war; the war itself, which is notably the shortest part of the book; and, finally, the long, painful and bizarre aftermath. There's no question that the rich, humorous characters add to the enjoyment but their stories serve the larger plot. The book makes no sense if you can't see it in its entirety. You might as well watch Wildcats if you think this is a simple football book.

OK, it may lag in places, it may not be everyone's cup of tea, but parts of this novel are so brilliant and laugh-out-loud funny that it hardly matters whether the final result is a masterpiece or simply a series of set-pieces. Made me ashamed of every "clever" thought I've ever had about football. His are a lot cleverer. Now I'm going to shut up and watch them Ravens.

"Football is life is war." DeLillo takes this old observation and turns it into "football is postmodern life is nuclear war." He spends most of the book hitting the reader over the head with the comparison between football and nuclear war, something one could have gotten from just the pun of the title.

This book feels dated. Both football and nuclear war were more relevant in the 1970s/80s. Even if you'd like to read DeLillo doing sports, Underworld may be a better place to find that.

However, this is a good place to find the germination of some of DeLillo's favorite themes, such as brand names, the German language, and nuclear strategy. Another treat is that Leopold Bloom from James Joyce's Ulysses appears here, as the character Bloomberg; you'll see Bloomberg give some of Bloom's monologues from Ulysses, recast into football terms.

As in any DeLillo novel, the language is brilliant, and the dialogue is hilariously unreal. However, the plot is thin (admittedly, I'm not a football fan), the themes are cliched and not developed beyond endless repetition of the football-war analogy, and nothing much really happens. It's a fast read, and not a bad choice if you like football, or if you've read all the other DeLillo novels, but this is certainly not DeLillo at his best.

Before I start, I just want to say that the current book cover to this novel looks way better than the one on my edition, which I think is supposed to look iconic but really just looks bland. So my hat is off to whoever at the publisher wised up and put a better one of there. Not that any of that means anything but I just wanted to point that out, for those of you who look at reading as a complete experience. In any event, this is an early Delillo novel that already shows him developing his style, it's rougher but at the same time a litle more pointed because the book is shorter, so instead of stretching things out, he cuts right to the chase, both in plot and dialogue. But that just makes it shorter, not better. Basically the plot involves players at a Texas college going through their football season in the shadow of the Cold War . . . and that's pretty much it. It's told from the point of view of one of the players, who narrates the whole affair, and features a pretty varied cast, the players, the coach, other assorted university people who wander into the narrative. But partway through you might be asking yourself "Where is he going with this?" and that's not a invalid question to be asking, since the ultimate point isn't really that clear. Are we supposed to equate the politics of a football game with nuclear war, or is Delillo mocking those same attitudes that seem to try and elevate sports to a metaphor for life in general . . . my heart says the latter is more the case because Delillo rarely takes the easy way out but in the course of its two hundred pages the book alternatively beats you over the head and hits you with a feather as you try to decipher exactly what you're being told. Delillo avoids most of the usual sports cliches and manages to keep the actual games pretty easy, even for someone like me to who sports might as well be a foreign country. His dialogue shines the most here, it's real stylized, you don't believe for a second that real people actually talk like that, but at the same time it hits its own peculiar rhythm that works in the context of the novel. His gift for prose is present but he hasn't reached the heights that later novels would achieve, although the voice is there already, propelling each sentence along. In the end it winds up being a bit of a dated read, especially for those readers who weren't around for the Cold War and are wondering what all the fuss is about (although in these times, the paranoia of the Cold War might start to feel really familiar) and those people who are not football fans are probably going to be turned off entirely. Don't be, the book really isn't so much about football as the people who play it and the world around them, as it twists and contorts itself in an attempt to maintain some sense of normalcy. In the end, there's only the game and the game isn't war, just as war isn't a game. Not a great place to start for someone trying to be convinced of Delillo's greatness, it's most appealing feature is its length, this is the kind of a book you can read in a few hours, so if you're looking for something interesting without wanting to invest a month of reading, this may be the place to go. It says what it has to say and gets out and that may be the best thing about it.

This book superficially deals with two cultures: football in the strange land of West Texas, and the new era of destructive modern warfare. While many morals and parables can be made out of Gary Harkness' excellent and lucid narrative, that he is a modern man in existential despair for example, Delillo's novel insightfully looks at a rational's chronic attempts at figuring out what it all means. Of course, what results is an entirely subjective account of life, but it's one that shuns bigger pictures and individual and cultural differences, embracing instead the need for a more primal experience based purely on the senses, such as football, or even warfare. In this account, bombing Germany means the same as nuking France. It makes no difference, just as bringing in a black football player into a racist land becomes only a footnote. The characters are colorful and you can learn much about human nature just by listening to what they have to say and by watching their body language. Overall, this is a bizarre book that has moments of fantasy, darkness and humor.