Book Review: The Throwback Special

In my quest for comp titles, The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder came up. The premise of this relatively short novel is killer: 22 middle-aged men gather every year to recreate "The Throwback Special," the play that ended the career of quarterback Joe Theismann.

For those in need of a refresher, the grisly play happened during a November 1985 Monday Night Football game between the Washington Redskins and the New York Giants. Washington ran a flea flicker, and when running back John Riggins pitched the ball back to Theismann after the handoff, the quarterback was already feeling the heat from the Giants defense. All-World linebacker Lawrence Taylor pulverized Theismann, whose leg snapped in vomit-inducing fashion on national television.

It ended up being the last play of his career. During the hit, Theismann recalled, his leg "snapped like a breadstick." It is one of the grisliest plays in football history. I don't suggest searching for the video online unless you're a psycho with a strong stomach.

With that very specific setup out of the way, The Throwback Special follows a group of men who recreate the play every year. They have very specific rules and pick their roles via an annual draft. Participants, for example, are only allowed to play Lawrence Taylor or Theismann every few years and everyone must serve at some point as an offensive or defensive lineman.

Image via Indianapolis Public Library

Certainly, the premise is interesting. These guys gather once a year and don't really know each other despite all the time they've spent together (it's been going on for 17 years). They watch film, they hold a draft, they order pizza, they swap stories, they lament problems at home and in marriages. 

Readers are introduced to a dizzying number of characters in a short span of time, and it's hard to keep up. Admittedly, some of these characters are memorable ("Fat Mike," for example, is an ironically named athletic Adonis and Carl is a barber who doesn't really like cutting hair every year).

The strength of the novel is the characters' collective adherence to tradition and ritual. Life isn't easy and recreating "The Throwback Special" grants them escape and release, at least for the weekend. Bachelder infuses the novel with plenty of dark humor. 

But because of the number of characters and the brevity of the narrative, he doesn't have much time to develop these valiant competitors. As a result, we get only sketches of these men and their dedication to the task--stylistically, I suppose readers come to know them just about as well as their fellow participants do over the span of more than a decade and a half.

It won't be for everyone. While football is at the center of the plot, the book doesn't spend much time talking about the game or, really, even the play itself. But you will walk away with one important understanding: Mark May always does his job.

Book Review: Leave the World Behind

Not every apocalypse needs to be a ridiculous, large, destructive spectacle.

That's one of the things I learned while reading Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam.

As I'm in the middle of revising/pitching an apocalyptic book of my own, this came up as a possible comp title. I have the feeling this one, published in 2020, gets brought up a lot.

The plot here is simple: a family shows up at their rental home for summer vacation expecting to get away from it all. Their vacation, however, is interrupted when people claiming to be the rental property's owners show up and ask if they can stay.

The renters, a family of four, don't trust these new guests, a wealthy couple who also happen to be Black. Their initial distrust, rooted in at least some racial bias, eventually gives way as it becomes clear something is happening in the outside world. 

Image via Indianapolis Public Library

New York City has experienced a significant blackout, but the rental home still has power. The televisions no longer receive a signal and the internet is down, making it nearly impossible to decipher what's going on in the world at large. On multiple occasions, they hear military jets speeding overhead.

It's unclear what's causing all of this--including a strange deer migration--but the lack of clarity is the point. The world is coming apart at the seams, whether that's due to war or ecological disaster or economic collapse. It doesn't really matter. The family and homeowners must learn to trust one another if they have any hopes of surviving. That trust is not easily earned.

This book won't be everyone's cup of tea. The narrative takes its time, even in a relatively short book. Don't expect any explanations, just a lot of atmosphere and character work. The writing, to me, came off a little self-indulgent at times. It seemed like Alam wanted to let everyone knows about his expansive vocabulary. Some mundane detail work, in my opinion, is also a little overdone.

I'm also not sure I liked many of the characters. They are well drawn but seem to lack common sense or compassion. They come off as selfish, which I'm certain is a product of authorial intent, as the book explores themes of race, class, and consumer culture. I think it's worth reading, if just for the pervasive sense of dread and the quiet, resigned nature of a dying world.

Without a doubt, this is a novel that invites discussion (and judging by some of the reviews, a considerable amount of division!).

Book Review: The Cactus League

I made a resolution this year to read more books. Part of this was because reading improves your writing. Part of it was because I found myself pretty deficient in the current marketplace. Part of it was that I needed comp titles for a book I wanted to pitch to agents.

The Cactus League (2020) by Emily Nemens came up as a possible contemporary comp because my work-in-progress explored the intersection of sports, character, and media.

Across its nine chapters, The Cactus League is about baseball, yet it's not. Each chapter tells a different story from a different point of view character. It all happens during spring training in Scottsdale, Arizona, for the Los Angeles Lions, a fictional MLB team. In the end, most of these narrative threads intersect.

Observing all of this is a sportswriter who provides a story-within-a-story of his own about Jason Goodyear, an absurdly talented baseball player whose gambling addiction derails his marriage and baseball career. Goodyear isn't the main character of the book, as there are many protagonists within the interlinked narrative, but he and his Lions are foundational to the story.

Image via Indianapolis Public Library

From the public's point of view, Goodyear is Baseball's Golden Boy, the next great superstar. Privately, however, he's a mess, indebted to loan sharks and even pilfering money from a rookie prospect who received a modest signing bonus.

The novel plays more like an interlinked anthology than anything, as the individual chapters tell stories from the points of view of different characters. While elements of the stories are connected, they're not obsessively interlinked, serving as side stories to the same overall narrative. I'm not explaining this very elegantly, but it works well enough.

At first, this approach threw me off. The first chapter is about a hitting coach who's back for spring training and discovers someone has broken into his house and lived there during the offseason. The next chapter follows a woman with a, let's just say "special," love of ballplayers. She encounters Goodyear and the two end up sneaking into Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, where Goodyear gets arrested after doing some property damage. 

Typically, you'd expect to come back to the Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 narrators as POV characters in the book, but that never happens. Subsequent chapters introduce new POV characters with new problems and plots. If a previous POV character reappears, they're a side character, a reference, or ancillary to the chapter's plot.

Some readers won't like this approach. Once I acclimated to it during the third chapter ("Oh, that's how this is going to go"), then I was fine with it. The individual stories are all well done, although I thought the sportswriter tangents were a bit much at times. 

The novel excels in its affection for baseball and spring training. You can tell Nemens is a baseball fan and most of the details land. There are some curiosities, like a pitcher who tosses a complete game in spring training, but overall, I think it's a searing double into the gap. Baseball is a ritual, and Nemens teases a lot of drama out of it.

On a personal level, it's neat that it was set in Scottsdale, Arizona, because that's where my wife and I went on our honeymoon about 20 years ago. Some of the sights and roads were familiar to me, and we actually visited Taliesin West on our trip.