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Title: End Zone by Don Delillo ISBN: 0-14-008568-8 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 1986 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (14 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Mediocre DeLillo, clever but cliched
Comment: "Football is life is war." DeLillo takes this old observation and turns it into "football is postmodern life is nuclear war." He spends most of the book hitting the reader over the head with the comparison between football and nuclear war, something one could have gotten from just the pun of the title.
This book feels dated. Both football and nuclear war were more relevant in the 1970s/80s. Even if you'd like to read DeLillo doing sports, Underworld may be a better place to find that.
However, this is a good place to find the germination of some of DeLillo's favorite themes, such as brand names, the German language, and nuclear strategy. Another treat is that Leopold Bloom from James Joyce's Ulysses appears here, as the character Bloomberg; you'll see Bloomberg give some of Bloom's monologues from Ulysses, recast into football terms.
As in any DeLillo novel, the language is brilliant, and the dialogue is hilariously unreal. However, the plot is thin (admittedly, I'm not a football fan), the themes are cliched and not developed beyond endless repetition of the football-war analogy, and nothing much really happens. It's a fast read, and not a bad choice if you like football, or if you've read all the other DeLillo novels, but this is certainly not DeLillo at his best.
Rating: 3
Summary: Cliched look at football
Comment: I picked up this novel based on the recent Sports Illustrated ranking of top 100 sports books, but it wouldn't make any list of mine. Good but not great, Delillo juxtaposes college football with nuclear warfare in what was meant as a satirical look at American life in the 1950s. It came off as a confusing, contrived mesh between the two.
Where Delillo does score well is on the dialogue. The comical conversations by teammates on the bench during pivitol action seem so real. And Delillo's terminology and feel for the game is stunningly accurate.
I found book too heady to comprehend. But in layman's terms I believe Delillo was simply trying to say that war is too grave to be compared to a game taken vastly too serious by a gladiator culture.
However, I felt Delillo was also trying to make the point that war and football are practiced by at times neurotic and destructive individuals.
Rating: 4
Summary: DeLillo's hilarious satire of football and cold war paranoia
Comment: 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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Title: Ratner's Star by Don Delillo ISBN: 0679722920 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 17 July, 1989 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Americana by Don DeLillo ISBN: 0140119485 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: July, 1989 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Running Dog by Don Delillo ISBN: 0679722947 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 17 July, 1989 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Players by Don Delillo ISBN: 0679722939 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 17 July, 1989 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: UNDERWORLD: A NOVEL by Don DeLillo ISBN: 0684848155 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 09 July, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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