A sardonic, fun take on big-time college football, where booster money plays first-team offense.
Majors (The Millionaires, 2009, etc.) goes comic on football when he follows graduate assistant Raymond Love, scratching for a coaching slot at a big-time SEC program, as he is assigned to drive for Coach Woody during the university’s annual Pigskin Cavalcade.
A top-notch small-college quarterback, Raymond grabbed a big-time SEC (think, Crimson Tide) graduate position, but he’s mostly an errand boy. Raymond stays on tiptoes when dynamic head coach, Von Driver, glad-hands through the locker room. Now Von Driver has assigned him to baby-sit Woody, the popular, talented, but eccentric assistant coach. Out among the boosters, Woody needs a keeper, something Raymond comprehends after he arrives at Woody’s house at midnight to find the old man sprawled on the floor in his bathrobe crying over Del Monaco’s operatic rendition of Othello. A Doberman is comforting Woody by licking his head, and the kitchen is equipped with a bottle of George Dickel whisky. Laugh-out-loud comedy populates the narrative, but the story’s essence evolves from the raunch and roll of Semi-Tough into a test of Raymond’s character. That’s on and off the field, for women are involved. In his spare time, Raymond has joined a book club, primarily to pursue the charming Brooke. Only later does he learn the beauty is the school athletic director’s daughter. There’s also Raymond’s good friend on campus, Julie, a grad student employee of the football office with a lawyer-to-be fiance in Washington. Woody is beloved, with goodwill in the bank, but on the calvacade, his love for the game’s purity means he cannot tolerate flunky treatment from a drunken, moneybags booster. A nose is punched. Jobs are lost. Raymond must choose between honor and ambition. Good lessons all, but Majors’ talent shines through his characters—Raymond, amiable, introspective; Woody, the lovable-crazy-amiable uncle; Von Driver, the archetype; TNT, who puts fanatic in the fan; and Barbara Driver, coach’s wife and ideal dinner companion on the rubber-chicken circuit.
A sardonic, fun take on big-time college football, where booster money plays first-team offense.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-06280-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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