End Zone

Set at small Logos College in West Texas, End Zone is narrated in first person by Gary Harkness, a blocking back on the football team during the school's first integrated year.In the first, Gary Harkness, the narrator, meets Taft Robinson, Logos College's first Black football player as well as Major Staley, the teacher of his modern warfare class.Gary begins dating Myrna Corbett and an assistant coach commits suicide just as the crowning game of the season approaches."[2] In The New York Times Book Review, Thomas R. Edwards deemed End Zone an improvement over Americana and said that the writing "is continuously energetic, shifty, fun to watch for its own sake.” Edwards also argued that "[Gary's] fever, casually introduced in the final paragraph, hints at the uncertain but possible value of vulnerability, persisting without certitude in a world where others accept defensive systems —technologies, religion, games, the large or small cultisms that flourish where fear is.”[3] Anya Taylor at The City University of New York argued the book would endure, especially praising Gary's desert meditation on the end zone.[10] Jeff Somers conversely ranked it 10th out of 17 of the author’s books, arguing that it was extremely funny but also that "there’s not much of a story here, and after meandering about for a while, it sort of just stops dead in its tracks.