"Yawaba, yawaba, yawaba."

"How to go, Gary boy. How to jump, how to jump."

"They'll twist our fingers back."

"They'll kill us and eat us."

Or the words of the Logos sports information director, a publicist hired by Coach Creed to work up a good press after the loss to Centrex:

"We get the vital stats. We get action photos. We get background and stuff. The T and G Backfield. We release to newspapers, to sports pubs, to local radio and TV, to the networks. The whole enchilada. Taft Robinson and Gary Harkness. I like the sound of those names. Some names produce a negative reaction in my mind. Cyd Charisse, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Xerxes. But Taft-and-Gary has a cute little ring to it. I know I like it, and I may even love it."

BUT EVEN isolated good satire can't hold together a disappointingly anticlimactic novel. DeLillo's buildup of suspense finally dissipates totally; many ominous hints are lost or forgotten by the end. End Zone is neither a thriller nor a mystery, and it shouldn't matter if I tell you that Gary, inspired to heights of asceticism by Coach Creed's commendation of humiliation of the flesh, comes very close to death by self-starvation at season's end. And there the novel ends, an enticing, finely ironic, but unfinished gloss to Eliot's lines on the end of the world.

I tried to get a friend who is, like Gary, a football player and an intellectual in his own way, to read End Zone. I suggested he start with the thirty-one page chapter that renders the entire Centrex game play-by-play--an honest and entertaining chunk of fiction, probably the best extended account of a football game ever written. But my friend wouldn't bite, because DeLillo hasn't quite got all the way inside football in this novel, and hasn't got all the way inside the novel form. The tasks aren't mutually exclusive but the novel, after all, has to hold its own above the parts it's made out of, and this one seems to die whimpering before they're all brought together. A season in the chaotic life of Gary Harkness, interesting as he is, does not suffice to make a satisfying whole. DeLillo, for all his diverse talents, hasn't organized his efforts well.