The Great American Football Novel

End Zone – Don DeLillo

It’s hard to be beautiful. You have an obligation to people. You almost become public property. You can lose yourself and get almost mentally disturbed on just the public nature of being beautiful. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. You can get completely lost in that whole dumb mess. And anyway who’s to say what’s beautiful and what’s ugly?

In this 1972 novel, our narrator Gary Harkness talks about life, his life, his now in this moment, with an accent on his wacky season carrying the pigskin and blocking for other running backs at Logos College. Gary is a halfback who has been tossed out of three universities due to his free-spirited attitudes. Though football involves physical pain, social awkwardness, and unsatisfiable coaches yelling, Gary concludes that he needs football. He ends up at a college in remote West Texas, a place that accepted him only because of father’s leverage and the desperation for talent that the once-disgraced coach needs to mount a professional comeback.

Gary accepts his life getting reduced to a minimum, where there are no distractions but football. And it's not just our narrator who is looking to nail down his own identity, his own now in this moment.

·         His roommate Anatole Bloomberg ponders finding an ideal body-weight (if he gets close to 275 he feels he’s entering a shaky personal reality). He also wants to shake his Jewish sense of the enormous nagging historical guilt of being innocent victims.

·         Billy Mast is enrolled in course on the unspeakable, whose prerequisite is knowing no German and whose requirement is that students memorize and recite Rilke’s Elegy in the original German.

·         Taft Robinson, black, deeply talented at fullback, self-exiled to all-white West Texas, tries to create different varieties of silence.

·         Gary’s female friend Myna Corbett is a blotchy chubby girl who is the source of the quotation above. But she changes her understanding of who she really is. She deals with the terrifying "responsibilities of beauty" in order to discover if she, as an individual, is something that really exists or if it's just “something that's just been put together as a market for junk mail.” Or by algorithms, these days.

The gridiron however is not sufficient to provide Gary a meaning to his life. Like a budding school shooter doing his own research, Gary looks for a passion to fill the void and finds it not in teenmale obsessions like cars or females or muscle dysmorphia or white supremacy but in information about the various aspects of nuclear war. Gary ponders apocalyptic scenarios that result in devastation of the planet and the death of millions.

Here DeLillo satirizes the techno-jargon of mass destruction and death. But the nuclear war game sequence between Gary and a prof still manages to be chilling, clutching at the throat. Being old enough to be have been totally freaked out by Jonathan Schell in 1982, I assure you back in the day Gary was by no means alone pondering the unthinkable possibility of nuclear Armageddon. But DeLillo also has Taft Robinson personify the cultural obsession that persists still today about Hitler, Nazism, death camps, etc. 

DeLillo makes fun of the ‘football as a metaphor for life’ thing by making football a metaphor everything: linguistics, sociology, anthropology, economics and religion. But also teenager fears, obsessions, aversions and aspirations. DeLillo reminds us old guys how young men talk to each other (for example, their parody of NASA/astronaut exchanges and spontaneous invention of games and traditions are a hoot). We have to agree on a standard language that helps us to predict and control the chaotic swirl of what we also agree is reality. But DeLillo argues that in the US we are far from agreeing that we carry the same dictionary, with the same meanings, through the chaos of the world. Words fail us because words are so often misused and abused by the media and experts and leaders of all stripes to mislead us.