THE '36 COMBINE

In this debut novel, a young football coach puts the hopes of a West Virginia town on his shoulders.

Alderson, West Virginia, 1936. The Depression has brought its share of pain to the small, rural town, but the single greatest cause of suffering may be the fact that the local high school football team hasn’t won a game in two years. Last season, the team didn’t even score a single touchdown. Narrator Billy Shelton puts it this way: “I read an article once in a National Geographic magazine which said that every culture in the world has initiation rituals to define the moment when a boy becomes a man.…In West Virginia culture, the rite of passage which separated the men from the boys was football.” Fifteen-year-old Billy, a milk delivery boy with an ailing father, just wants a shot to prove himself on the gridiron. That shot may have just arrived in the form of the new football coach, 27-year-old Alexander Arbuckle McLaughlin. Coach, as everyone calls him, recently built a successful program elsewhere, and Billy and his teammates have hopes he can bring that magic to Alderson. But can one man really inspire a down-on-its-luck town to get back on its feet? Smith’s prose captures the language and texture of the setting. Here, Billy describes foraging for a local delicacy: “Picking Chinquapins is a tricky business, though. That’s why they aren’t grown commercially. First, you have to find them before the squirrels and birds get them. Second, the nuts are covered by a prickly bur. Getting a nut out of an unopen bur is difficult. You have to put it on the ground and roll it under your shoe.” The author includes wonderful period details, like the Farm Women’s Club setting up looms in the school’s gymnasium in order to weave rugs and blankets there during the summer. These slice-of-life moments are the book’s strongest asset, helping to sharpen what is otherwise a fairly standard and predictable sports story. Readers with ties to West Virginia may be the most suitable audience for this novel flecked with vivid local color.

A high school sports tale with a familiar arc and a richly rendered milieu.