The Opposite of Death: Don DeLillo’s End Zone – Manuel Marrero
February 10, 2025
“Over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit if you can imagine what that’s like. They found bodies naked except for shoes. That was heat that did that, not fire.” A girl who talks like a Don DeLillo novel reminded me this book exists. Prosocial gestures have generally brought me pain. But I’d like to keep talking to her and I’ve exhausted my plays with respect to the social contract where radical inconstancy has been codified as etiquette or at least acceptable. Our seeming affinity and repartee has evaporated for unclear (nuclear?) reasons. She probably heard something about me she didn’t like. My reputation’s outspring. She (dis)embodied the inscrutably and seductively vanishing woman trope recurrent in my Lynchian life. Regarding the year of the crash out, these things can kill the poetry if not careful. Like get these bitches off me. Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my sentient novels. I’m going to become Houellebecq. This review may paraphrase parts of our conversation.
“I’m becoming too psychomythical in my orientation. I need a reality increment.” A urtext that prefigures everything from Dispatches to Infinite Jest to Yellow Switch Palace, End Zone is a gamified, augmented reality, a thermal dimension of homeostasis and incubation for the greatest military minds in the country too tough to die for which this “thunder and gore” and glory are the only things that matter. The move, the play, the way. “The sun. The desert. The sky. The silence. The flat stones. The insects. The wind and the clouds. The moon. The stars. The west and east. The song, the color, the smell of the earth. Blast area. Fire area. Body burn area.” Knife fighting in the trenches for twelve years. Psychogenic shrapnel “burn beyond recognition.” You may respect your competition insomuch as decency demands, but you don’t care about anything they’ve written, and it is your goal that they aren’t read in lieu of you. Reality is schismogenic. “History is the angle at which realities meet.” Categories deteriorate.
Athletics are existentially abstracted to an unchained melody over a gridiron, “sadistic” “head-hunters” “think clearly,” “speak straight,” “accept pain,” “genetic advantage,” “genetic damage,” their “personal welfare” deprioritized as “self denial purifies the will” to “restrict the sense life.” In solemnly militant religious intonations, it is a manifesto for “living close to yourself,” for better and worse. “This is not just one thing we’re watching. This is many things.”
“even the smallest warmth compromised immersion in the elements.” “It takes character to win.” “It’s not just about the amount of mileage you put in. The insults to the body. The humiliation and fear.” “Fasting and solitude.” “Loneliness is strength.”
“Existence without anxiety. Happiness. Knowing your body. Understanding the real needs of man.”
“It paid, in his view, to follow the simplest, most pioneer of rhythms—the eternal work cycle, the blood-hunt for bear and deer.” “Beyond these honest latitudes lay nothing but chaos.” Blind “grind” it out. “Puff up” in the cut.
“Suck in that gut and go harder.”
“I had not yet learned to appreciate the slowly gliding drift of identical things; chunks of time spun past me like meteorites in a universe predicated on repetition.”
In the end it is “time to face Mecca.” Or an infarction.
“Here is not just order but civilization.”
“I am on the verge of concluding that an individual’s capacity for violence is closely linked with his ascetic tendencies. We are about to rediscover that austerity is our true mode.”
It is possible to write so arrogantly, aggressively well that no one will deny you and everyone will read you. Auspiciously, Don DeLillo dropped this before he was a household name. His second novel. He produced seven novels in under a decade, a winning season culminating in White Noise. A powerhouse of discipline and stamina who’d write seven hours a day, four hours at a time punctuated by walks. End Zone runs the table of things a novel can do. Redoubtable descriptive powers. DeLillo describes things you’ll recognize as familiar immediately, wondering how the ineffably precise concept filtered its way from “unsyllabled” thought to the domain of expression to the carotids, prose that answers the highest aspiration (to be poetry), dialogue my ears expect to hear in a parlance ringing true, indelible characters. Situations which must reach expression. Triangulation problems. Intractable problems. It is about the pitiless, impassive, and elegantly intricate problem of deterrence by mutually assured destruction. About brokenness and frailty, tension and tenderness, muscles contracting in a game of inches, agreeing with a harsh winter.
“The sun’s heat purifies the thinking apparatus.”
“Don’t ever get too proud to pray.”
If not for the end of history and the year of the crash out, there’d be no need for the “chapter and verse,” a Manchurian detachment. DeLillo exemplifies the writers I fall in love with. First a glossophile, then a storyteller, then the exalted idea of both. Language is paramount, a sort of endangered aphrodisiac textured, sonorous, visceral, symbolist, neurologically sensuous, balls screaming a mandate to repopulate the earth with an effusion of gushing preterite semen rivers. “by language itself, by that compartment of language in which are kept all bits of diction designed to outlive the men who abuse them, all phrases that reduce speech to units of sound, lullabies practiced through intricate systems.” It lays language’s failures at humanity’s feet along with all the bad karma, “it seemed that beauty flew from the words themselves, the letters, consonants swallowing vowels, aggression and tenderness, a semi-self-re-creation from line to line, word to word, letter to letter. All meaning faded. The words became pictures. It was a sinister thing to discover at such an age, that words can escape their meanings.” In the basement to which language lowers us, there’s a difference between “sounds” and “noises.” But difference melts in cartilage and carnage. We are “large bloody meat-hunks we might rip apart with mastiff teeth.” At one point, a football player is maimed by shrapnel. “Don’t use words.” “You can’t get out of it with words.”
DeLillo was raised Catholic and coy about his religion. It’s telling he thinks our religion is the American people. Religion allows miracles. “Without belief in miracles, we are like reeds shaken with the wind.”
Mysticism and spirituality shroud the mysteries of its materialism with transcendence, there is “desert” and an erotic scene goes like “positing herself as the knowable word, the fleshmade sigh and syllable. She was beautiful, broad as a many-sectioned cubistic bather, conceptually new, cloud-bosomed, ultimate. To be forever loved in ways unworthy.” I was struck by the steak for dinner and prayer. I was struck by the “gash” and “crime of suggestion” of homoerotica. It is a “laugh and a half” “nourished by the heavens” for the “remission of sins.”
“their normal uncanniness of knowing exactly how to retaliate, with whatever exact give-and-take, the way only women can do, giving back tenfold but with a genius that makes it seem even steven.”
“I thought of women. I thought of women in snow and rain, on mountains and in forests, at the end of long galleries immersed in the brave light of Rembrandts.”
“Instead I thought of tits. I thought of flaming limbs, a moody whore’s mouth, hair the color of bourbon.”
“this loyalty to give, this eager violence of the heart, and he would smash his body to manifest it.”
“doing private and almost theological calisthenics, bringing God into the frenzied body, casting out fear.”
“Being made to obey the savage commands of unreasonable men.” “Being made to lead a simple life.”
A “fat girl” dressed like “an explosion over the desert.”
It is logomachy. “Divine electricity.” “war and insanity.” Awaken your body to variables of stress, open your heart up to affection and extinction, “get loose” in “ritual danger.” Concerned with “angles, elevations, intervals” “of incidence, of reflection,”“tilts and counter-tilts, angles commenting on other angles.” Concerned with minds trained to “reduce in size and meaning whatever experience” overthrown by beauty in “an idiotically lyrical moment.” It doesn’t cold-open with an untethered spectacle like his later novels, but they’re quietly couched in telepathy and synchrony unwise to discount (often a sign you’re on the right path). Nuance-beveled structures echoing. Kinetic narrative architecture pointed and bizarre.
His sentences are more than startled. They throb, breathe, tremble, and vibrate at a frequency only the attuned can hear, belying oceans of meaning. A superpower that “just keeps coming and coming,” an eternal onslaught of majesty glimpsed for pages that attack you “empty of remembered dreams,” dreaming of annihilation. Cracked and combustible body horror about militias of mild men who “respect the run” and will pop you, ascetic with “unwritten limits” nowhere beneath dignity. Biblical, theological, cosmic, a cadre keyed up in spirit, valorized and glamorized to blowout and showdown as standard bearers for superstitious infernos clashing. Everyone remembers everyone and everyone saw it.
To say nothing of what the generation conditioned to astonishing casual cruelty and disincentivized from civic participation or purpose may select for. Unreal, unhappy, and alone in their terminal “single mindedness.” It chants this bardo.
“History is guilt.”
My reputation precedes me. My words vindicate me.
“What you and I say this evening won’t add up to much. We’ll remember only where we sat, which way our feet pointed, at what angle our realities met.”