End Zone - Hardcover

DeLillo, Don

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395136458 ISBN 13: 9780395136454

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1972

Synopsis

At Logos College in West Texas, huge young men, vacuum-packed into shoulder pads and shiny helmets, play football with intense passion. During an uncharacteristic winning season, the perplexed and distracted running back Gary Harkness has periodic fits of nuclear glee; he is fueled and shielded by his fear of and fascination with nuclear conflict. Among oddly afflicted and recognizable players, the terminologies of football and nuclear war--the language of end zones--become interchangeable, and their meaning deteriorates as the collegiate year runs its course. In this triumphantly funny, deeply searching novel, Don DeLillo explores the metaphor of football as war with rich, original zeal.

About this title

Review:

Don DeLillo's second novel, a sort of Dr. Strangelove meets North Dallas Forty, solidified his place in the American literary landscape in the early 1970s. The story of an angst-ridden, war-obsessed running back for Logos College in West Texas, End Zone is a heady and hilarious conflation of Cold War existentialism and the parodied parallelism of battlefield/sports rhetoric. When not arguing nuclear endgame strategy with his professor, Major Staley, narrator Gary Harkness joins a brilliant and unlikely bunch of overmuscled gladiators on the field and in the dormitory. In characteristic fashion, DeLillo deliberately undermines the football-is-combat cliché by having one of his characters explain: "I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing." What remains is an insightful examination of language in an alien, postmodern world, where a football player's ultimate triumph is his need to play the game.

About the Author:

Don DeLillo is the author of two plays and thirteen novels, including Underworld and The Body Artist. He has won the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1972
• ISBN 10: 0395136458
• ISBN 13: 9780395136454
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 242