"Nobody, it seems, could write better than this. No one could have a clearer vision of the micro-circuitry of post-modern life" Evening Standard
A rich parody of the parallels between the jargon of football and the jargon of battle - and a touch of cold war existentialism - makes this powerful novel as hilarious as it is relevant.
Ostensibly, DeLillo's blackly comic second novel is about Gary Harkness, a football player and student at Logos College, West Texas. During a season of unprecedented success, Gary becomes increasingly obsessed with the threat of nuclear war. Both frightened and fascinated by the prospect, he listens to his team-mates discussing match tactics in much the same terms as generals might contemplate global conflict. But as the terminologies of football and nuclear war - the language of end zones - become interchanged, the polysemous nature of words emerges, and DeLillo forces us to see beyond the sterile reality of substitution.
This clever and playful novel is a timeless and topical study of human beings' obsession with conflict and confrontation. Don DeLillo is the acclaimed author of fifteen novels and three plays. He has won the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.
