Word: delillo
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Dates: during 1972-1972
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...characters escapes neurosis in End Zone. Just about all of them are occasionally crazy. Which, given the stock assumptions about the monomania of football players in the southern college conferences, shouldn't be too surprising: it's easy to think of such men as single-minded brutes. But Don DeLillo's novel tries to avoid the stock assumptions about football: it doesn't assume that you have to be mad to want to play football in Texas, instead attempting to deal with the game from the inside. So the reasons for this unsettling prevalence of neurosis are a little more...
...DELILLO'S NOVEL operates through deadpan-absurdist humor, and brute suspense. Names, conversations, non-sequitur events become progressively more other-worldly (sub-rather than sur-real) and the concatenations of bewildering vignettes are glued together only by the reader's curiosity. But all the while, DeLillo demonstrates his golden ear for the tin and tinsel of Americanese, and many of his dialogues skewer perfectly the soft spots in academic double-talk, adolescent vagueness, the jargon of nuclear warfare (as in Herman Kahn's own book of the dead. On Thermonuclear War), public relations yes-speak, and the excruciatingly serious military...
...EVEN isolated good satire can't hold together a disappointingly anticlimactic novel. DeLillo's buildup of suspense finally dissipates totally; many ominous hints are lost or forgotten by the end. End Zone is neither a thriller nor a mystery, and it shouldn't matter if I tell you that Gary, inspired to heights of asceticism by Coach Creed's commendation of humiliation of the flesh, comes very close to death by self-starvation at season's end. And there the novel ends, an enticing, finely ironic, but unfinished gloss to Eliot's lines on the end of the world...
...read End Zone. I suggested he start with the thirty-one page chapter that renders the entire Centrex game play-by-play--an honest and entertaining chunk of fiction, probably the best extended account of a football game ever written. But my friend wouldn't bite, because DeLillo hasn't quite got all the way inside football in this novel, and hasn't got all the way inside the novel form. The tasks aren't mutually exclusive but the novel, after all, has to hold its own above the parts it's made out of, and this one seems...