Wrestling with DeLillo’s End Zone: A Half-Century of Frustration

I read Don DeLillo's End Zone more than 50 years ago and have pondered its meaning ever since. I keep thinking DeLillo's novel is nothing but one big dead-leg fake.

DeLillo sets the reader down on the campus of Logos College in West Texas, where the administration has hired a legendary coach with a checkered past to turn the school's football program into a powerhouse. As a key catalyst for winning, he's recruited a black running back with 9.3 speed in the hundred.

Observing all this is Gary Harkness, a talented running back who has washed out of several major universities. Gary, detached and adrift, likes football and nuclear war, describing the violence of both with a poet’s eye.

Gary summarizes himself thus: "As an athlete, I have serious lapses. I don't play football as much as drift in and out of cloud banks of actions and noise. I'm not a one-hundred-percent-in-the-American-grain football player. I tend to draw back now and again in order to make minor discoveries that have no bearing on anything. I conduct spurious examinations. I bullshit myself."

A perfect description of DeLillo's efforts with this novel. He dances with football, nuclear war, higher education, race relations, authority, loneliness, death, and love, spinning away from each partner before the music ends.

I am haunted because I don't know what he's trying to say, but I appreciate key moments in the novel. For instance, there is a 30-page football sequence in which Logos plays a powerhouse rival. The prose is terse, energetic, immersive, and graceful. It's some of the best sports writing I've ever read.

That's enough for me--the cloudbanks of action and noise. Those give me peace.