End Zone

### Amazon.com 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.

### Product Description

'Nobody, it seems, could write better than this. No one could have a clearer vision of the micro-circuitry of post-modern life' Evening Standard Ostensibly, DeLillo's blackly comic second novel is about Gary Harkness, a football player and student at Logos College, West Texas. During a season of unprecedented success, Gary becomes increasingly obsessed with the threat of nuclear war. Both frightened and fascinated by the prospect, he listens to his team-mates discussing match tactics in much the same terms as generals might contemplate global conflict. But as the terminologies of football and nuclear war the language of end zones become interchanged, the polysemous nature of words emerges, and DeLillo forces us to see beyond the sterile reality of substitution. This clever and playful novel is a timeless and topical study of human beings' obsession with conflict and confrontation. 'Powerfully funny, oblique, testy, and playful, tearing along in dazzling cinematic spurts… A masterful novel' Washington Post