END ZONE

You may remember DeLillo's recent first novel Americana which never succeeded in getting it to gether although then, as again now, he seems to have at his natural command a kind of articulate mobility one cannot help but admire. This psychomythical (his word) abstraction is presumably about football but actually about speed ("speed is the last excitement left, the one thing we haven't used up"), violence, and penultimately and most particularly war. Much darker in tone than Robert Coover's Universal Baseball Association, it also deals with the game which is played on the field as well as those existential calisthenics which take place off it. . . football as a last archaic atavism, or as a surrogate for deadlier combat, or as a preface to the nuclear debacle which can't be far off. It's hard to take a body count of all those ideas which freefall off every page but then "the thing to do is to walk in circles." And occasionally pause. . . .