End Zone - Softcover

Powerfully funny, oblique, testy, and playful, tearing along in dazzling cinematic spurts . . . A masterful novel. * Washington Post * 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 * America's greatest living writer. * Observer *

Ostensibly, Don DeLillo's blackly comic second novel, End Zone, is about Gary Harkness, a football player and student at Logos College, west Texas. During a season of unprecedented success, Gary becomes increasingly fixated on 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.