RED ZONE

The famed sportswriter’s blitz of one-liners sacks his latest football novel.

It’s not that the jokes are never funny; it’s just that they so seldom stop. Again and again—as was the case in Bump and Run (2000), to which this is a sequel—the effect is to strip a scene of its drama, or to undercut character credibility, the sine qua non of maintaining reader interest. Too bad, because Jack Molloy—a man with a code in a world that has no time for such abstractions—is a character people might like if they were allowed to take him seriously. More than a year has passed since Molloy’s New York Hawks, the team he inherited from his father, posted that stirring victory in the Super Bowl. Aside from swanning around in Europe, Molloy has done little with his life since, and nothing that could be considered positive. On the negative side, he’s managed to make a kind of Faustian bargain with a robber baron named Dick Miles, and when he wakes up to the starkness of its implications, he discovers he’s got scads of money and no football team. True enough, the title on the door says President, but controlling interest is owned by the rapscallion who euchred him out of it. Sobered by his own fecklessness, Molloy dedicates himself to retrieving what he once swore he’d never part with. Not easy. Shrewd as well as ruthless, Miles has attacked the Molloy support system, systematically dismantling it: friend and coach allowed to seek Green Bay pastures; secretary and all-purpose loyalist fired for bogus reasons; and so on. But Miles is about to learn what others have before him—it’s a mistake to underestimate an aroused Molloy.

A novelist forcing cleverness is like a QB forcing throws into double coverage: prospects bleak.