End Zone by Don DeLillo (1972). At Logos College in West Texas, huge young men, vacuum-packed into shoulder pads and shiny helmets, play football with intense passion. During an uncharacteristic winning season, the perplexed and distracted running back Gary Harkness has periodic fits of nuclear glee; he is fueled and shielded by his fear of and fascination with nuclear conflict. Among oddly afflicted and recognizable players, the terminologies of football and nuclear war-the language of end zones-become interchangeable, and their meaning deteriorates as the collegiate year runs its course. Tom LeClair writes: “Underworld is DeLillo’s masterwork, but End Zone is my personal favorite, probably because it (along with Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.) showed me how a sports novel could ratchet up to treat the most serious of cultural subjects, in DeLillo’s case nuclear annihilation. The novel’s first-person narrator is also the edgiest of DeLillo’s many acute and raspy speakers.”
Total Points: 2 (TLeClair 2)