VOODOO BALL

A golf fanatic finds himself suddenly transported to a world that shares his obsession.

As Mortensen’s novel opens, readers meet Charley Cotter, “a thirty-four-year-old taxpaying father of two with a mortgage, car loan, and a worried wife who should be channeling his energies in responsible directions.” Charley is a passionate golfer. It’s on the links that he talks and jokes with his colleagues and superiors, deals with an obnoxious course worker and ball collector named Floyd Birdwell, and experiences the particular thrill of the game itself. “Your hands experience an exhilarating, effortless feeling as the ball compresses against the clubface and springs into hyperspace,” reads one of the book’s many ecstatic descriptions of golf. “Rising gracefully against the sky, maybe even drawing a yard or two, correcting to dead center, the trajectory a brush stroke drawn across the sky.” Charley’s wife, Cathy, asks him if he ever daydreams about what his life would be like if he’d devoted it entirely to golf, found a great teacher, and gone pro. But as the plot stands, he’s an amateur surrounded in his normal life by people who never think about golf. When Charley survives a mysterious plane crash, he emerges in a very different world, “someplace else. Someplace crazy.” In this world, golf is everywhere, having undergone a massive renaissance (along with a fugitive spinoff game called “snogging,” created by “renegade golfers reacting to skyrocketing greens fees and the suburban sprawl that’s been gobbling up municipal courses by the acre”). Charley quickly realizes that some of the bedrock details of his own personal life have likewise changed. What ensues is both a gimlet-eyed satire of golf mania and a surprisingly moving story of a young man desperately seeking to restore the parts of his earlier life that he allowed himself to neglect in favor of his obsession. Mortensen employs a nimble, fast-paced prose line of finely paced humor. Most of his characters are outlandish in some way or another, perfect for the self-mythologizing of the golf course.

A highly effective entry in the niche genre of golf dystopia.