The point of DeLillo

End Zone (1972) by Don DeLilo

I've watched exactly one American football match. It was as American a setting as one could reasonably hope for: the recreation room of a friend's large house in Denver, Colorado. Colorado is one of two rectangular states that form the United States of America. Its aspect ratio is 15545:11124. The other is Wyoming; 58574:44515. You need continental space to draw rectangular administrative units like this. The mini fridge hums, contented, full of IPAs. It saves us the long walk to the kitchen in this large house in this large state in this large country. A mini fridge is as American as rectangular states. In this recreation room an elliptical machine and treadmill stand behind the dark sofa, a second line of furniture facing the projector screen. On it overbearing muscular American men shoved and ran after each other for short bursts until the play ended. The commercials came in. Darkly tinted political attack ads against local congressmen; quick cutting sponsored by Patriots of America. Well lit lab coat men tell you to ask your doctor about the newest opioid. Condensation on aluminium coalesces into a drop which slides down the beer can's side, revealing a brand you already know but now associate with hazily erotic imagery. Lettuce and tomato fall onto bread. Sizzle. Then we're back. I sip my beer. The American men are ready for another play.

End Zone by Don DeLillo is about one of these American men. I picked it up and held it in front of my face for a while for three reasons. Number one: I like DeLillo. Number two: I wasn’t threatened by its slim 230 pages and, number three, according to the blurb, Gary Harkness, football player at Logos College, west Texas is afflicted with an obsession with nuclear catastrophe. Something about this appealed to me. I like obsessives. I like atomic war in the abstract. Maybe a fourth covert reason was that I wanted to understand what made this stop and start game, so ripe for advertising breaks, so interesting to so many people.

Guy Harkness fills his days training for and playing football, musing on the harsh west Texas desert, dating Myna, a nerd who says she doesn’t want to take on the “responsibilities of beauty” by clearing her acne or losing weight. And Guy is visited by images of burning cities. He befriends Major Staley, his sad and lonely teacher in “modern warfare” class, a class taught for bored ROTC students, a class Guy attends out of earnest personal interest. He wants to get to grips with the exact mechanism of megadeath. The siloes, the blinking radar screens, the B-52 bombers and the megatons of explosive force represented by the SS-9 intercontinental missiles, global violence on a grand scale.

I find it hard to write or say anything worthwhile about fiction. Book chat is elusive. “DeLillo is Good, let me read you my favorite passages,” I might start but the passages only work in context. You need to be lulled into a set pattern before they hit you squarely and honestly. Which brings me to one of DeLillo's key attributes. DeLillo surprises. That's the point of DeLillo. Every few pages you're rattled by something unexpected. A weird phrase. Overlapping and incongruous dialogue. The plain weird. I kept thinking: is this even allowed? Can a character all of a sudden assume the personality of a satirical Oppenheimer with no lead up, no explanation?

Can two team mates, who have played side by side but never spoken, have their first conversation start off like this:

“A hundred thousand welcomes,” he said.
“Thought I'd drop by.”
“Come right in. Find a chair and make yourself right at home. I see you've already got a chair. If I'm not mistaken, you're already in the room and you're already seated.”
“That's correct. I'm here and seated. What you see, in fact, is exactly what you think you see.”
“We might as well begin then.”
“Begin what?” I said.
“The dialogue. The exchange of words. The phrases and sentences.” (221)

Or, when Guy and a teammate do their pre-game ritual:

…I grabbed Buddy by the shoulder, spun him around and hit him with a forearm across the chest, hard. He answered with three open-hand blows against the side of my helmet.

“Right,” I said. “Right, right, right.”
“Awright. Aw-right, Gary boy.”
“Right, right, right.”
“Awright. Aw-right.”
“Get it up, get it in.”
“Work, work, work.”
“Awright.”
“Awright. Aw-riiiight.” (99)

This continues for a while. You don’t hear this sort of dialogue in your recreation rooms, watching the Denver Broncos vs the Baltimore Ravens on TV, but isn’t it the same energy?

DeLillo explores his chosen themes slowly, repeatedly, in uncanny and compelling ways. Be it explosive and fiery death (End Zone), or plain death (White Noise) or crowds and zealotry (Mao II). This is the point of DeLillo. He rattles off the technical terminology until eventually American football and Cold War combine and you feel like you're reading an immersive art installation.

The characters often talk like particularly bright PhD students. This is another point of DeLillo. Natural speech, is uh, kind of, how people talk in real life, is you know, a bit hard, uh, to read... so, yeah, don’t. And since you're writing sentences in an unnatural way already, do you. Hmm. Do you really need to stick so rigidly to plausible sentences? No. You actually don't. You shouldn’t. The reader has learned to relax and cooperate. Even more so with DeLillo. You need to suspend your disbelief in the same way as you might with an Aaron Sorkin movie.

Arguably End Zone fails on only one account. It doesn't really have much in the way of a plot or conclusion and, as abruptly as this article, it simply ends.