A well-written, intriguing sports tale that explores the importance of home base.
A college baseball player struggles with his faith and sense of belonging when he transfers schools in this literary novel.
After his recovery from Tommy John surgery, college pitcher Vincenzo “Enzo” Prinziatta hopes to catch the attention of pro scouts. But when his 2015 junior year at State University of New York New Paltz passes without any offers, Enzo turns his attention to Cortland, a star in the SUNY Athletic Conference that’s known for its fan-friendly rituals. Enzo is reluctant to exit New Paltz; he’s a big fish in a small pond, and he’s leaving behind his family, his friend and catcher Lakewood “Semzy” Semend, and his girlfriend, Shannon Hestian, softball player and model. Not only that, Shannon is pregnant, and Enzo or his frenemy Barry Budski may be the father. Enzo also struggles with belief; he’s become rededicated to Roman Catholicism, but he’s disturbed to learn that his father lost his faith while dying painfully. What it comes down to, Enzo tells his adviser Father Pann, is that he wants his chance to play pro ball someday: “Beyond that, I think I want to find some place where it feels like home.” Enzo makes the switch from the New Paltz Hawks to the Cortland Eagles and heads to Cortland Summer Camp to prepare for his senior season. But his longing for order is upset by the Eagles’ strange hazing rituals, which leave him off balance—especially the contributions of Trudy Booth, the team’s Chinese-Taiwanese-American fellowship counselor, who spouts New Age–y slogans while stretching alluringly in skintight clothing. She’s also the coach’s wife. Enzo endures it all in the name of fitting in, but can he find a home at Cortland? Enzo is a thoughtful athlete reminiscent of Henry “Author” Wiggen in Mark Harris’ quartet of baseball novels, most notably Bang the Drum Slowly (1956). But Marcopolos (Womyn Do: The Healing of JOHNNY R3BEL, 2016, etc.) offers a postmodern twist. The mysterious keeps taking prominence in this novel: the hazing rituals, which are amusing, sexy, confusing, and disturbing all at once; the hard-to-figure attitudes of Enzo’s teammates; oddities like a replica of the Winchester Mystery House that somehow features a pagan mechanical bull ride; Trudy’s oracular pronouncements; and portentous dreams and symbols involving several dead birds and brick-tied balloons that a teammate pops. Each image speaks of death and aborted flight, a counterpoint to Enzo’s longing for the big leagues and a home that isn’t stifling. Also complex is Enzo’s character. He wants to do the right thing, is compassionately moved by the plight of a boy with a harsh father, but is a self-admitted “douchebag” to Shannon and considers standing up to a sexist teammate’s “joke” to be a fight not worth having. It’s a bit too convenient, however, when Enzo and Shannon’s baby is stillborn—another popped balloon and one that prevents Enzo from having to truly grapple with the consequences of his actions, marriage, or fatherhood.
A well-written, intriguing sports tale that explores the importance of home base.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9862428-7-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Kykeon Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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