Review by New York Times Review
IN HIS WISTFUL and elegantly written fourth novel, "The Throwback Special," Chris Bachelder plays Jane Goodall to a large group of middle-aged men who assume the role of his chimpanzees. Bachelder observes their rituals with a blend of affection and befuddlement over the course of a weekend, when they have gathered to take part in an activity that feels somehow both wildly imaginative and completely familiar. For 16 straight years, they have re-enacted one of the most iconic and gruesome plays in football history, when the Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor sacked the Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann in 1985, shattering Theismann's leg and ending his career. The injury, broadcast to a large national audience on "Monday Night Football," became a long-term trauma for many viewers. Bachelder doesn't dwell on the importance of the play for his characters. The space it occupies in the imaginations of a certain generation is simply assumed. (Michael Lewis's best seller "The Blind Side" starts with an extended analysis of the play and its ramifications.) Bachelder's conceit combines two forms of particularly male obsession: the mental escapism of fantasy sports and the tactile fetishism of Civil War re-enactments. But the book's central activity is neither of those well-known pursuits, and its imaginative freshness allows for sly new questions to be implicitly asked about men's relationship to sports, to violence, to nostalgia and to one another. The group partakes in a lottery to determine which player each will portray. No one gets to select Theismann. That honor - or burden - falls to the last m an whose name is drawn. The one with first pick often opts to be Taylor, sometimes simply to be the prime mover in the action, but sometimes out of fear of what the others will think if he demurs. There must be something wimpy about not wanting to snap a man's leg, even if it's just make-believe. (For all its Robert Bly-meets-Shirley Jackson setup, the men's annual ritual doesn't extend to actual violence.) Though their staging takes the football spectator's thirst for physical risk one small step out of the metaphorical realm and toward the real, these guys can't be mistaken for gladiators. They so envy the one person in their ranks who is in peak condition that they give him the ironic nickname Fat Michael: "He had engineered himself, his physical being, in his 40s, to make others feel rotten, and what kind of person would do that?" In one scene, friends named Andy and Robert talk about their various ailments, including back spasms. ("Neither man could put on socks while standing up.") Underneath their conversation, in a manner perfectly indicative of Bachelder's methods, Andy is remembering to himself a scene both heartbreaking and heartwarming, from the night he told his two children that his marriage was dissolving. The men have "reached an age when they gained and lost significant things in relatively short periods of time." These things include God, sideburns and step-children. Three have dropped their smoking habit, and in one funny scene each of them hesitates about making the admission, assuming the others are still hooked. Other habits stubbornly remain: Peter parks in the same out-of-the-way spot at the hotel every year "out of his unarticulated sense that continuity was of a higher priority than convenience." Bachelder zooms out at one moment to find the men relaxing while appreciating the predictable pleasures of the hotel's continental breakfast. Compared with some of the weekend's more rigorously scheduled and defined activities, the thoughtlessness is a gift: "Unbeknown to the men, this was what they came here for, every year. They were enjoying their morning, but they did not realize it. The good moments, it is true, were always this way, interstitial and unacknowledged. They craved occasion, but did not understand it. Halfway through their lives - considerably more than halfway, in several cases - the men knew nothing of their own vast contentment." At times like those, when Bachelder steps right up to the edge of the sentimental while remaining in full control of his tone, "The Throwback Special" conjures the rewarding melancholy of Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe novels. But whereas Ford's books are deep dives into a single consciousness, "The Throwback Special" is about how groups of men interact with one another in a way that nearly subsumes their individuality. What Bachelder is after, and often captures, is akin to the noise he describes at one point emanating from the hotel lobby: "waves of masculine sound, the toneless song of regret and exclamation." The book's few shortcomings are baked into the concept. Given the need for 22 men (11 per team), and a few other tertiary characters besides, everyone blends together from the start. A week or two after finishing the novel, scenes and philosophy will linger, but faces won't. You may not remember Jeff, but you'll remember his thoughts about marriage, which start innocuously enough: "All it is, he said, and he said he learned this too late, but all it is, is watching someone and having someone watch you." THE PERSON MOST differentiated from the others is Derek, who represents the "allure of annual interracial acquaintanceship" and thus always has a group of the guys around him. Derek "was of mixed race, which is to say he was black," the only black man among the friends. He becomes especially magnetic when working on his car, a situation that creates for the other men an "irresistible synergistic force, the dream of multiculturalism fused with the dream of automotive expertise." Derek's race doesn't rise to the level of a plot point, but Bachelder does use it very effectively once, to help him address the figure of Lawrence Taylor, a tremendously gifted player who lived with reckless abandon on and off the field during his career. Derek "could not help but feel a twinge of distaste about the way that some of the men played Taylor, with a kind of wild-eyed, watch-your-daughters primitivism." He grants that "you could not portray Taylor with the workaday, gaptoothed brutality of the archetypical white linebacker, ... but one needn't venture into minstrelsy, either." Such moments aside, the general feeling of this cast as a blended hive is useful for universalizing the book's sociological insights about men and masculinity, but it will still occasionally frustrate readers wanting a better grip on who's who, or wanting to follow one of these people in their specificity for more than a few paragraphs at a time. When the actual re-enactment finally happens, it's on a cold, rainy day, and the desultory vibe brings to mind the thought had by Robert earlier in the weekend: "There was not a good way to talk about what he was doing here." As the men get ready to replay the fateful moment, one of the few spectators turns to another and says, "These guys are going to get hurt." Bachelder's book is a lovely testimonial to the fact that, yes, they - and all of us - are. A novel explores how men relate to sports, violence, nostalgia and one another. JOHN WILLIAMS is a senior staff editor at The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 10, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
This is a book about men. Is it ever! Twenty- two men gather annually to reenact the grotesque football injury (comminuted fractures to two leg bones) suffered when Washington quarterback Joe Theismann was crushingly tackled by New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor in a Monday Night Football game in 1985, remembered years later by millions of football fans. Published to coincide with the event's thirtieth anniversary, the novel takes off from this seemingly unpromising setup to deliver a frequently very funny satire about men in our times, from the ridiculous (the convoluted lottery by which these guys choose their positions for each year's reenactment) to the pathetic (a litany of what the reenactors have occasionally come home to find their daughters and wives doing), but, overall, it's a surprisingly enjoyable and even poignant read. If the trick play resulting in the injury went terribly wrong, Bachelder's unlikely approach is deftly right. This novel may appeal mainly to fanatical football fans who are also readers of literary fiction a restricted market, to be sure but it merits a far larger and more diverse audience.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A real-life football tragedy-the sacking of Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann by New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor in a 1985 game, and the career-ending injury that Theismann sustained as a result-is the foundation of this wryly amusing rumination on manhood and male bonding. Every year for the past 16 years, 22 men have convened at a hotel at an unnamed location off of Interstate 95 to physically re-enact the historic game. What at first seems a slightly screwball form of fantasy football-the men are assigned their roles through a lottery governed by an idiosyncratically detailed set of rules-gradually reveals itself to be a metaphor-rich elaboration of the rules and regulations that shape mature male life. As the men discuss their static marriages and their difficult relationships with their children, the allure of the game-especially the time before the fateful play when "the things that had not happened yet were greater than the things that had happened"-becomes clear. Although Bachelder's (U.S.!) characters sometimes blend indistinguishably into one another-perhaps not unintentionally-the anxieties and concerns that define them are genuine. One man, considering why people marry, theorizes that "the only thing marriage can really give you is the sense that your life is witnessed by another person." In one hilarious scene, three men supposedly step out to share a ritual smoke, making it awkwardly impossible for each to reveal to the others that he gave up smoking that year. Filled with subtle humor and incisive insights, Bachelder's novel will resonate with anyone who has pondered the game of life. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In this comic dissection of male bonding, a group of men gathers for their yearly celebration and re-enactment of a notorious play in professional football. In their 17th annual gathering, 22 men arrive at a 2 -star hotel on U.S. Interstate 95 for a weekend of rituals tied to the five seconds in 1985 when Lawrence Taylor of the New York Giants sacked Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann and fractured the tibia and fibula of his right leg, ending his career. Bachelder (Abbott Awaits, 2011, etc.) looks at the strange, inane, and obvious things American males deem holyas well as the many small pains they tend to share without "sharing." Among the weekend's big moments are the lottery assigning each man's role as a real-life athlete from the 1985 game, the viewing of video of the sack, and the re-enactment itself. Bachelder seems able to riff wryly on almost anything. One conversation concerns those whose wives have asked them to sit while urinating. Another details a man's attraction to the women pictured in illustrated children's books. Yet another drifts "inevitably toward vasectomy and time share." Eight delightful pages begin: "It would be difficult to overstate the men's enthusiasm for continental breakfast." As a group, the middle-aged men produce "waves of masculine sound, the toneless song of regret and exclamation." They often talk in a "complex alloy of sincerity and derision." One on one, they may speak quietly of their children and marriages and wonder when "daily life [would] cease to consist of a series of small threats." Bachelder's take on manhood is sharply observed and sympathetic and funny enough to win over even those readers who abhor football and its fans. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
