Although not Super Bowl material, this novel is nevertheless a winner: a fun, breezy read that even lukewarm football fans...
A veteran football player seeks to overcome the odds and lead his team to a championship.
In his first novel for adults, Bentley (No More Hiccups!, 1995, etc.) takes readers through a season with the Buffalo Blizzard, a pro football team down on its luck. The protagonist, Jack Driftwood, a 17-year veteran linebacker, hopes to end his career in glory by propelling the team to the Mega Bowl. Play-by-play accounts of regular and postseason games alternate with chapters delving into Driftwood’s personal and business affairs. He meets Gerry Wainscott, gorgeous daughter of the team’s elderly owner, Gerald Wainscott III, and becomes her lover. But the Blizzard’s general manager, Donald Fegel, desires her too, and hates Driftwood anyway. Scheming to kick this “renegade linebacker” off the team, Fegel bribes a male nurse, aka the Pissman, to doctor results of a random urine test. Enraged at the skullduggery, Driftwood attacks Fegel but is subdued by security guards and sent to a mental hospital for observation. But it turns out Fegel has been skimming money from the construction funds for the Blizzard’s new stadium and an adjoining Native American casino. Driftwood’s wacky friends, including an overweight Buffalo cop, a Seneca tribe member, a restaurant owner from Mexico, and a few shady local underworld types, unite, seeking to expose Fegel, do in his associates, and break Driftwood out of the hospital. Bentley, a former NFL player, shows an insider’s knowledge and love of the game, and gives vivid descriptions of brutal play on and off the field and the quirky, foulmouthed characters in Driftwood’s life. The dialogue is sharp and the wit often acute, but Bentley makes some rookie mistakes. Spell-check hasn’t fixed all his missteps with spelling and word use, such as “teaming” for “teeming.” And the clichés come fast and furious, but seldom with the sharpness that’s needed: “She smoked like a chimney, cussed like a sailor, and drank like a fish but was as healthy as a horse.” Despite all of its humor and big doses of testosterone, violence, and physical and emotional pain, the tale can occasionally become strangely mawkish, as in a Gipper-esque appearance in the locker room by the Blizzard’s sickly owner.
Although not Super Bowl material, this novel is nevertheless a winner: a fun, breezy read that even lukewarm football fans might cheer.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-943706-00-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Five Count Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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