Books : End Zone

Rating: - Penultimate Delillo
End Zone / 0-14-008568-8

End Zone, an allegory between football, war, and destruction, wonderfully fleshes out the Delillo obsession with mass death and world devastation. His characters wear shirts with mushroom clouds festooned on the front, they brood over Risk-esque games that focus around an "end times" scenario, they meditate in the desert on the nature of death, the meaninglessness of life, and pain of existence. The football analogy is apt, and carefully exploited, but there is much more at work here and even if you don't like, understand, or follow football, the message is not lost.

Like White Noise, the analogy centers around the inner workings of an isolated college campus (White Noise has a campus isolated in an idyllic Eastern American setting, End Zone features a campus isolated in a harsh Southern American setting). The students play silent games such as "Bang-You're Dead!" and the slow, melodramatic death throes of the players brings a depth of meaning to their otherwise hectic and worried lives. Students stress over weight, football skill, philosophy, and term papers, but this normal stress takes on a heightened, penultimate status in Delillo's fevered pitch. Like White Noise, End Zone invites us to examine our lives for deeper meaning, but the meaning we find we may not like.

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Rating: - To Play Or Not To Play
This was a riot! Small college football team - half of whom are the stereotypical "dumb jocks" and the other half are Rhodes Scholars. Imagine if you will the interplay among them as they go through a season.

Not a football fan? No problem. You probably will be no closer to being one after reading this book. But you will be a fan of DeLillo. The sports setting is just his device for a take on the study of war.

Why only four stars? This is one of his earlier books and the writing wasn't as developed. The story and the characters, though, make this a fast and fun read.

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Rating: - Delillo's Early Classic
"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.

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Rating: - Extreme states
End Zone is a taught, spare novel that focuses on extreme states of mind and place. Delillo, developing the tone for most of his work, uses super-smart, semi-sane, white American males to work through the peculiar sensations and emotional curves of modern American life. There are heavy hits of data, meditations on extreme ideas of philosophy, love, language: 'If any words have reality outside language they are German', nuclear war - with a wild speculative 'mythic' meditation on this at the novel's climax, and most of all, the hard power plays of football.

On this last point, I am not familiar with the game. But quickly it becomes apparent that this is what the book is about. Right out the traps, typical sentences emerge: 'Hit and get hit; key the pulling guard; run over people; suck some ice and re-assume the three-point stance.' (p2).Presumably Delillo knew most of his readers would not be hardcore football fans (I guess the overlapping point in the venn diagram of lovers of avant garde pomo literature and college jocks is not massive). As a result, for me, much of the book read like Samuel Beckett having a whirl at some weird sports poetry about an absurdist game somewhere west of Endgame or Godotville. The dialogue is original and powerful, and tighter than in Delillo's first novel, Americana, but I found less sustenance here than in that book. Still, it is one of the most original sports novels you are likely to find, even if it is the sort of book that divides opinion.

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Rating: - Very weak and I'm a DeLillo fan
The book had some moments, but they were few and far between. I get the metaphor, but then what? Football as a metaphor for life and war isn't exactly new, and while DeLillo has a nice style I just felt let down. The only thing I could say about DeLillo's End Zone is at least it wasn't as bad as the Body Artist.