I have rarely felt as bad for a character in a book as I did for Mr. Waugh in Robert Coover's ingenious, almost prescient novel. This is of course theI have rarely felt as bad for a character in a book as I did for Mr. Waugh in Robert Coover's ingenious, almost prescient novel. This is of course the story that predates fantasy baseball by some 30 years, but it's playing for higher stakes than that. A while back, ESPN had this on a list of the top 100 sports books of all time -- and a deep interest in baseball is certainly advised -- but it's not really about baseball.
Waugh is a loner, a social misfit, and I really grew to like him, shared his enthusiasm for his completely imaginary, intricately-detailed history of the Universal Baseball Association. But what he is made to do, based on his elaborately arranged system of dice rolls, is up there with the great tragedies of literature. Hyperbolic? Yeah, a little bit. But Coover sold me on this poor schmuck's anguish....more
First read in 2008 at 26; re-read in 2020 just shy of 39.
This book was first published in the mid-2000s admist a glut of similar office-themed storiesFirst read in 2008 at 26; re-read in 2020 just shy of 39.
This book was first published in the mid-2000s admist a glut of similar office-themed stories; it was shortlisted for the National Book Award, so it's not fair to say it wasn't highly regarded at the time, but I wonder if in the years since it's taken a cultural backseat to those other works (Office Space; two versions of the The Office, etc.) That shouldn't be; this novel holds up remarkably well.
Ferris tries a lot of audacious things here, the first-person plural voice being only the most obvious. On first read, I think he expends so much capital getting you to buy into the "gimmick" of the voice that you're predisposed against his other narrative gambits ((view spoiler)[the "serious" middle section in conventional third person; the metafictional revelation that this section was written by one of the characters (hide spoiler)]). They all seem like self-consciously grand literary gestures. On this second read, though, I think he pulls them off with the deftness of a veteran novelist, and I was much more attuned to the pathos of the whole novel.
Or maybe I just need another decade of working life behind me to really appreciate it.
Everything you've read about this book is true: the peerless dialogue, the dumpy locales, and the seedy bagmen all written to perfection. Sometimes I Everything you've read about this book is true: the peerless dialogue, the dumpy locales, and the seedy bagmen all written to perfection. Sometimes I take this book off the shelf and read a random chapter, just to hear these characters talk to each other. From what I've read, Higgins kind of went overboard with the dialogue thing as time went on, hundreds of pages of torrential, argot-heavy conversations, but Eddie Coyle comes lean and mean.
Like the best crime novels, it's only vaguely about crime and more about human nature. Everybody in here is lying. They're all screwing everyone else over. They profess honor in one breath while looking out for themselves in the next. It's funny, it's razor-sharp, and it has one of my favorite first sentences anywhere: "Jackie Brown, at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns." Tell me you don't want to read what comes next....more
First read at the age of 25, when I was a few years younger than Kenny Becker; read a second time at 36, now a few years older. What jumps out at me oFirst read at the age of 25, when I was a few years younger than Kenny Becker; read a second time at 36, now a few years older. What jumps out at me on this re-read is how much more acute Kenny's desperation for some human connection feels to me now. Kenny's loneliness gets hidden behind his carefully-crafted image as some kind of Lothario in the gleeful pre-AIDS era, but updated for the millennial generation he'd be masking the same essential loneliness through some equally vacuous social-media persona.
The book ends with Kenny asking his friend Donny, (view spoiler)[who he now knows is gay (hide spoiler)], out to share a meal, without expectation of sex or any other distraction. Just companionship. Male friendship that isn't buried beneath layers of hyper-sexualized posturing and sports is rarely depicted in popular culture; the idea that Kenny the Riffer might drop the shtick and speak candidly to another man is something I now read as a radical act of self-preservation. I'm rooting for him....more
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