THE REDSHIRT

A college football team serves as a macho proving ground and a deep repository of secrets.

King College in North Carolina is one of the country’s premier academic institutions, but it’s hapless in Division 1 football. So attracting talented players requires some compromises. Miles, the rueful narrator of Sobel’s debut, remembers King as one of the few places willing to take on an underweight linebacker (he’s 17, having skipped a grade in elementary school). It’s also where he believes he can explore being gay far from his conservative Colorado hometown, until he enters the team’s homophobic bubble. Reshawn, Miles’ roommate, is more of a puzzle: a star running back with his pick of programs who inexplicably opted for an NCAA doormat. In the year or so the novel covers, both men weather the emotional toll of needing to belong. Miles absorbs teams hazings and stomachs casually slung anti-gay slurs while laboring to maintain a budding romance with a classmate who refuses to be closeted. Reshawn, an academic wunderkind as well as an A-list athlete, suppresses his intellectual side while concealing his reasons for choosing King. Sobel, who attended Duke on a football scholarship, writes engrossingly about football's punishing physical and psychological rituals. And though his characterizations are solid, too, the book's style and tensions are so straightforward that it reads more like a YA novel. A subplot involving Reshawn’s research on a well-educated freed slave feels forced and underdeveloped, as do Sobel’s late efforts to work in riffs on Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” (The latter trope reinforces the sense that the book is a gridiron reprise of The Art of Fielding.) Still, the core crises that Miles and Reshawn face feel authentic, and Sobel smoothly persuades the reader to witness their many bruises.

A promising debut, albeit with some familiar conflicts.