Word: delillo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...GENT'S going over ground trod much more surely, if not as entertainingly, by Don DeLillo in End Zone, and in the end his version of po' boys at play in the fields (and beds) of the energy lords rings more than a tiny bit hollow. The cornerback, Jenkins, realizes the decrepitude of the crew he runs with, but he wants to run a little longer; he never comes to the realization the protagonist of North Dallas Forty did, namely, that there comes a time to put away childish things Mabry Jenkins is alienated from his work place, but nailing...
...DeLillo plunks this passive protagonist down in a futuristic think tank called Field Experiment No. 1. His task, to decode a series of radio pulses being received from the vicinity of a G dwarf designated as Ratner's Star. Billy is soon accosted by a parade of scientists and deep thinkers. Their names (Shlorno Glottic, Grbk, Orang Mohole, Desilu Espy, Hoy King Toy) seem to peg them as refugees from Thomas Pynchon's Central Casting. Their inevitable behavior - alternately cerebral and cloacal - confirms the identification...
...DeLillo's aim is to show how the codification of phenomena as practiced by scientists leads to absurdity and mad ness. It is not his fault that Pynchon is simply better at weaving advanced science and cartoon characters into a convincing whole cloth. Still, Ratner's Star, for all of its monotonic monologues, of ten displays impressive erudition and the same inebriated infatuation with language that worked so well in DeLillo's End Zone, his surrealistic send-up of football and warfare...
...DeLillo can be funny as well as instructive. One typically addled character calls Cadillac "the Rolls-Royce of automobiles." A scientist, speculating that cosmic growth outward may have ended, imagines a newspaper headline: UNIVERSE SAID TO CEASE EXPANDING; BEGINS TO FALL BACK ON ITSELF; MILLIONS FLEE CITIES...
When it finally comes, the solution to the mystery of those radio pulses is both eerie and intriguing. On the minus side, DeLillo surrounds it with so much sophomoric static that the message is nearly drowned...