Sport Fiction and the Untellable: Cliche and Language in Don Delillo's End Zone‪.‬

Tough it is often acknowledged as one of the best novels written about sport, Don DeLillo's End Zone has never really struck me as a sports novel. Michael Oriard and Christian Messenger, respectively, have described DeLillo's book as a "complex sport novel" (241) and as the "most provocative and intelligent of all football fiction" (302), but I question such easy categorization. Just a few weeks ago Michael Nelson suggested in the Chronicle Review that End Zone was one of the 10 best college sports books ever. Though he acknowledged the book was about a lot of things, Nelson concluded that it was "mostly about college football" (B7). But is it? After all, though it is a story that revolves around a college football team in West Texas, End Zone's narrator, Gary Harkness, seems less interested in personal athletic accomplishments or the success of his football team than he is with little obsessions scattered throughout the story: obsessions with language and routine, food and weight, nuclear warfare, and silence. As one might guess from the story about a team from Logos college--a name that not only means "word" but also evokes the religious implications of "the Word"--End Zone seems to be much more about the problems of language that David Cowart has identified in all of DeLillo's fiction than it does about football. (1) I suspect that DeLillo isn't really interested in football at all, but rather, he writes about football because of the ways language structures what is normally seen by many as mindless barbarism. Yet in conversations I have had with those in the Sports Studies department at the University of Iowa, this seems to be a common explanation for all contemporary sport fiction. They aren't really about sports, we say of various stories. One novel might be about the relationship between a parent and a child. One might be about letting go of the past. One might be about the unhealthy grip of obsession. But they never seemed to be about sports. And perhaps this is good. I am weary of describing, categorizing, or evaluating a book based on what it is about. It seems much more relevant to focus on what the book does.