Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Sophomore slump?
It is rather a truism that some very fine authors, especially those who make a real impression with their first books (and it's interesting how many well-known authors didn't do that, or whose first books are now forgotten), don't do quite so well with their second. It sounds obvious, but it has been characterized as "sophomore slump," and it may, after all, be common enough to deserve a name. Some avoid it by publishing their second novel first (Pynchon, for example, wrote V after The Crying of Lot 49, even though they were published in the reverse order. Of course, no one would have accused him of slumping in his second book had they been published as written.)
Don DeLillo is now pretty well recognized as a genius, but you wouldn't really know it from his second book. (I admit that it's the only book of his that I've read so far.) It's a nice book, even a good book, but not a work of genius. I'd prefer to call it a work of attempted genius.
End Zone is an interesting read now, thirty or so years after it was first published. The hero, a college football player of limited commitment (he has been drifting down from Big Eight schools to a small college in West Texas), is obsessed with the doctrines of nuclear warfare and deterrence. Thirty years ago, this was part of public policy discourse. Thirty years ago, we assumed that nuclear weapons were the province of big powers (plus France, of course). Mutual Assured Destruction made some kind of sense. Not so much, now. North Korea's strategic nuclear goals are not to destroy the U.S. in case of an attack. (What those goals really are is open to debate, if not psychoanalysis.)
With our view and fears of nuclear war dramatically changed since the Seventies, the book seems almost quaint in that respect, and the connections between football and American militarism are either trite (seen from the left) or discredited (seen from the right). So perhaps it is not so much that DeLillo failed in this book as that time has passed it by. Certainly the issues he was looking at then (the global issues, that is; not the personal issues that form the heart and motivation of the book) seemed at the time to be lasting and universal.
(They are, of course, but the vocabulary of their discussion has shifted so much that this book seems quaint. I would not say that American militarism is no longer a matter of debate, or nuclear warfare; rather, we are using new metaphors for them. The underlying reality of nuclear warfare has also shifted from superpower-vs.-superpower to "asymmetric" conflict in which the destruction of all life, or at least the transformation of human civilization, is not a necessary result.)
So the great social and cultural hook from which much of the book hangs has been removed, and the protagonist-football player must stand on his own, outside his cultural context. But he is an exploration of his context. Without it, he is just a football player in a book that focuses more on training and practice than on games (there is really only one game in the book). He does complete the season (an accomplishment for this player), but the changes that come in part as a result of that seem metaphorically tied to the times, so his own story does not survive the metaphor shift in the global discourse.
dmh
Don DeLillo is now pretty well recognized as a genius, but you wouldn't really know it from his second book. (I admit that it's the only book of his that I've read so far.) It's a nice book, even a good book, but not a work of genius. I'd prefer to call it a work of attempted genius.
End Zone is an interesting read now, thirty or so years after it was first published. The hero, a college football player of limited commitment (he has been drifting down from Big Eight schools to a small college in West Texas), is obsessed with the doctrines of nuclear warfare and deterrence. Thirty years ago, this was part of public policy discourse. Thirty years ago, we assumed that nuclear weapons were the province of big powers (plus France, of course). Mutual Assured Destruction made some kind of sense. Not so much, now. North Korea's strategic nuclear goals are not to destroy the U.S. in case of an attack. (What those goals really are is open to debate, if not psychoanalysis.)
With our view and fears of nuclear war dramatically changed since the Seventies, the book seems almost quaint in that respect, and the connections between football and American militarism are either trite (seen from the left) or discredited (seen from the right). So perhaps it is not so much that DeLillo failed in this book as that time has passed it by. Certainly the issues he was looking at then (the global issues, that is; not the personal issues that form the heart and motivation of the book) seemed at the time to be lasting and universal.
(They are, of course, but the vocabulary of their discussion has shifted so much that this book seems quaint. I would not say that American militarism is no longer a matter of debate, or nuclear warfare; rather, we are using new metaphors for them. The underlying reality of nuclear warfare has also shifted from superpower-vs.-superpower to "asymmetric" conflict in which the destruction of all life, or at least the transformation of human civilization, is not a necessary result.)
So the great social and cultural hook from which much of the book hangs has been removed, and the protagonist-football player must stand on his own, outside his cultural context. But he is an exploration of his context. Without it, he is just a football player in a book that focuses more on training and practice than on games (there is really only one game in the book). He does complete the season (an accomplishment for this player), but the changes that come in part as a result of that seem metaphorically tied to the times, so his own story does not survive the metaphor shift in the global discourse.
dmh
