Reviews

End Zone by Don DeLillo

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owhite's review against another edition

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Dnf because of the cringe invisible man joke

tsharris's review against another edition

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4.0

Great college and sports novel in postmodern garb. Occurred to me about halfway into it that this clearly was an inspiration/source for DFW in Infinite Jest.

ashrafulla's review against another edition

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4.0

This book makes the appropriate level of philosophical debate for a book about a football team. As a result the style is mentally demanding without being pretentious. Most of the book is exploration of the thoughts of college age football players as they mentally mature from simple If-Then logic to complicated analysis of their lives. In doing this exploration without falling into the trap of being douchey, the author has created a very enjoyable work that can be but should not be read quickly.

While many people would call the main theme of this book the exploration of the id of Gary Harkness, I would say it is more of a point counterpoint about the (trivial) conflict of football and the (nontrivial) development of perception. Everyone's review focuses on how Gary and the others view football. That is missing a large chunk of the beauty in this book.

The best example is the final dialogue in the book between Gary and Taft. Football is at best a minor part of the dialogue. To me it is totally irrelevant. That discourse is a synthesis of what choices the two young men have. It includes the attempt at simplifying life though the two men's lifestyles, the analysis off future prospects, the meta analysis of social norms and the final consensus regarding what that moment means going forward. Football is a vehicle but not the point of this book.

I wished some of the monologues were a bit more broken up so as to be digestible but this is a minor quibble. The book is an excellent read and worth the ten hours of reading time you'd need.

cdeane61's review against another edition

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3.0

I'm pretty sure I like reading DeLillo. I put off picking up another of his books after reading White Noise, because I feared being disappointed.

One thing for sure, DeLillo makes me laugh. I can't say i feel i understood what he was getting at in this book, but I enjoyed it enough to keep reading it.