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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a sharp start,
By
This review is from: End Zone (Paperback)
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.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Delillo's Early Classic,
This review is from: End Zone (Paperback)
"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.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
DeLillo's hilarious satire of football and cold war paranoia,
By metheb (Seattle, wa United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: End Zone (Paperback)
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.
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