ROUGHNECKS

Cochran's first novel puts a fresh angle on a familiar story: Rival high-school football teams square off for the state championship. Instead of putting readers on the field, though, Cochran takes them inside one player's head for a full day's mental preparation, rituals, flashbacks, and general ruminations. Senior Travis Cody, raised in a Louisiana town so obsessed with the sport that every boy gets a toy football at birth, looks with mixed feelings at what will most likely be his final game. He is eager to face the team that handed the Oil Camp Roughnecks its only defeat in the regular season, but all the backslapping and boosterism is beginning to wear thin, and the once-remote prospect of life after football is upon him. Rising before dawn on game day, Travis mulls over the personalities and personal influences of nearly everyone he knows, recapping the history of his dying oil town, college plans, football's pleasures, pains, and character-building aspects, and other topics. With an artfully suspenseful set of pre-game preparations, the stage is set, but the characters remain stuck in prescribed, limited roles; Travis occasionally sounds more like an adult looking back than a teenager looking ahead. Cochran primes readers for an explosive contest, then pulls out the rug by ending the story after one play—closure on an intellectual level, but not an emotional one. Despite the unevenness, this is a promising debut: thematically complex, strongly written. (Fiction. 12-15)