The Eleventh Man (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: east base, wire clerk, raft rats, Tepee Weepy, Bill Reinking, Great Falls (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the solid latest from veteran novelist Doig (The Whistling Season), 11 starters of a close-knit Montana college championship football team enlist as the U.S. hits the thick of WWII and are capriciously flung around the globe in various branches of the service. Ben Reinking, initially slated for pilot training, is jerked from his plane and more or less forced to become a war correspondent for the semisecret Threshold Press War Project, a propaganda arm of the combined armed forces. His orders: to travel the world, visiting and writing profiles on each of his heroic teammates. The fetching Women's Airforce Service Pilot who flies him around, Cass Standish, is married to a soldier fighting in the South Pacific, which leads to anguish for them both (think Alan Ladd and Loretta Young). Meanwhile, Ben's former teammates are being killed one by one, often, it seems, being deliberately put into harm's way. Doig adroitly keeps Ben on track, offering an old-fashioned greatest generation story, well told. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Molly Gloss

The 11 men alluded to in the title of Ivan Doig's new novel compose the starting football team for fictional Treasure State (Montana) University in its much-heralded undefeated 1941 season. Now, in 1943, 10 of those men are scattered in far-flung theaters of a world war, and the 11th, Ben Reinking, is writing up his teammates' exploits for a military propaganda machine called the Threshold Press War Project -- TPWP, sardonically known as Tepee Weepy.

The story occasionally jumps back to earlier events in Ben's life and to the 1941 football season, in particular a pivotal week before the opening game when the sudden death of a teammate was the catalyst for the so-called "season of the Twelfth Man." But the bulk of the novel follows Reinking as he chronicles his teammates' war experiences -- and, when necessary, their deaths -- for publication in newspapers around the country.

It's a shapely premise for a novel, allowing Doig a broad canvas on which to paint the breadth and scope of World War II: Carl is bogged down in the forests of New Guinea; Jake pilots Lend-Lease planes from East Base, Mont., north to Russia; "Animal," on a Marine troop ship, hopscotchs from one island beachhead to the next; Sig, in the Coast Guard, patrols the Puget Sound shore; Moxie bosses an anti-aircraft gun pit in Antwerp; Nick serves on a destroyer in the Pacific; and Dexter is confined to a conscientious objector camp in the north Montana woods. Add to these a squadron of Women Air Force Service Pilots -- WASPs -- assigned to East Base, ferrying military aircraft north to Canada, and nearly every military operation is in play.

Scenes range from the jungles of Guam to the Butte du Lion of Waterloo, but the story returns again and again to East Base, Mont., where Doig, not surprisingly, is at his most lyrical, evoking the landscape of Ben Reinking's (and Doig's own) childhood. "Wheatfields winter-sown and fallow stretched below like checkered linoleum laid to the wall of the Rockies. There to the west he could pick out the long straight brink of Roman Reef and its dusky cliff, and the snake line of watercourse that would be English Creek. Gros Ventre, though, held itself out of sight beneath its cover of trees."

English Creek and the town of Gros Ventre are familiar place names in Montana's Two Medicine country that Doig first imagined for his trilogy about the McCaskill family, novels that are still perhaps his best-known works: English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana.

The Eleventh Man is more wide-ranging and plot-heavy than those earlier works. Statistical probability means nine of the 10 on the "Supreme Team" should survive, but those odds are neither a guarantee nor a consolation; as the novel opens, two of the team are already in their graves, and another has lost a leg, fighting in Sicily. Soon, Ben Reinking is writing a third obituary, and then a fourth. As one by one the men perish, the novel takes on a growing sense of doom and inevitability.

Ben, on temporary assignment at East Base, falls for the WASP commanding officer, Cass Standish, and their love affair casts its own dark shadow: Cass is a married woman with a husband serving in Guam. Mysteries underlie both the season of The Twelfth Man and the fateful roll call of deaths reported in Ben's Tepee Weepy dispatches. There are lengthy scenes of battle: the invasion of Guam, the battle of Leyte Gulf, the bombardment of Antwerp, all described in historical detail.

Yet this is not a novel with a strong sense of suspense or dramatic complication. Most of the deaths befalling the "Supreme Team" happen off stage, relayed to Ben and to us after the fact; and we're almost halfway into the book before something occurs that puts Ben himself in peril. For a war novel taking place on such a wide, dangerous field, the book is remarkably quiet. Doig is known for his rich imagining of local American history and the nuances of human relationships, and this is a book that deliberately keeps its attention on the places where war intersects with those less dramatic themes.

He is also sometimes called old-fashioned, which can be either criticism or approbation, depending on your point of view; and granted, it's sometimes hard to distinguish nostalgia from careful, thoughtful avoidance of cynicism. There are a few cringe-inducing moments in The Eleventh Man, especially in the romance between Ben and Cass. "She flicked him the urgent smile that showed the irresistible tiny gap between her front teeth, and he melted like a schoolboy and knew it. Deeply and rigorously they kissed again, running their hands silkily here and there, as if keeping track of everything in the book of hotel-room romance."

But The Eleventh Man vividly evokes a prior time and way of being. It takes a serious view of war and the practitioners of war, and looks hard at the meaning of heroism. And not incidentally, it contains enough loose threads to hint at a sequel, which will be good news to Doig's many loyal readers.


Copyright 2008,The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (October 13, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151012431
• ISBN-13: 978-0151012435
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #169,613 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not a book about war.........., October 13, 2008

By	A reader "doigfan" (Not lucky enough to be in Montana) - See all my reviews

Ivan Doig has written a book that takes place during World War II, but this book is not ABOUT the war. Instead, he has written a touching, sometimes wrenching chronicle of one man's quest to 'beat the odds'. Although this novel takes place over two years during a terrible time in history, it is not a historical account of the war. It is the story of one man's search for his purpose in life, always viewed through the lens of what might happen to that life if the odds don't go his way. I loved this book, and did not want to turn the last page. Every one of Mr. Doig's books has deeply touched my heart, and this one is no different. If you know Mr. Doig's works, you know what I mean.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "bitter arithmetic", October 13, 2008

By	K. M. "literary devotee" (California) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

The Eleventh Man is Ivan Doig's fictional meditation on the perplexing question of why a given group of farflung American active combatants might suffer far higher mortality than the national average. Ben Reinking was one of the 1941 "Supreme Team" of Montana's Treasure State University (based loosely on real Montan college players). The former teammates all served their country after Pearl Harbor, believing most of their number would return home and continue on with their lives. What if, however, this group hung out on the edge of the probability bell curve where "bitter arithmetic" held sway, where the law of averages was out of whack?

The novel simultaneously explores unsung battle theaters and underpublicized war arrangements. TPWP (a Doig fictional stand-in for the actual Office of War Information's news arms) intended to use the Supreme Team as a public "morale" tool, and it commandeered Ben away from his pilot's training to become a war correspondent and write about his former teammates. Since the men were stationed in various combat zones around the globe, Ben traveled far and wide to interview them. But they didn't take part in the hallmarks of the war we now recall most such as D-Day in Europe.

Jake Eisman, for example, flew Lend Lease B-17 Flying Fortress bombers to Alaska where the planes were turned over to Soviet pilots. In one of his most engrossing adventures, Ben hitched a ride in the Plexiglas nose cone of a bomber Jake delivered.

Ben also traveled to the Olympic Peninsula near La Push, Washington to patrol isolated headlands with Sigmund Prokosch of the U.S. Coastguard. Sig kept watch for Japanese submarines at sea, the chance of some offloads onto land from those subs, and balloon bombs that could set the vast forests ablaze. Sig was engaged. She was called Ruby, and when Sig said her name, Ben thought "the word glowed as if it were her namesake gem. Love and the salt taste of absence, old as Odysseus...."

Sig wasn't the only one in love. At East Base, a squadron of women pilots test flew various planes for the Air Transport Command (yes, this female squadron was based on real history too). In the book, Captain Cass Standish was their leader. She was also Ben's lover. Her husband, a Montaneer, had been off fighting Japs in the Pacific jungles while she, a WASP, served in this unusual female duty stateside. What would they all do if and when the Montaneer returned?

Meanwhile more of Ben's gridiron buddies were dying, sometimes within almost arm's reach, more often far away. The reader becomes increasingly anxious that all members of the Supreme Team might perish. Will they? Who will survive? Will there be any reason for who dies and who doesn't?

The Eleventh Man is a work that requires attention. It doesn't have an straightforward structure, especially at the beginning. It jumps fitfully in time and place, sometimes depriving the reader of background. For instance, one has to largely accept the proposition that the Supreme Team is really a special group because very little of the team's gridiron time is explored. What is clear is that the crux of their football career had to do with a twelfth man. Was his death by overexertion his own fault, the result of coach hazing, or something else?

As the reader progresses into the heart of the novel, however, its themes and characters emerge as out of a fog. Ben, his parents, Cass and her squadron, and guys like Jake and Sig matter. So, when Doig dispatches certain people is a hurry toward the end, one gets the feeling the author was tired and just wanted to finish. Perhaps, Doig could have developed more up front and at the end, while trimming some paragraphs? Various passages could get their points across with fewer sentences.

On the one hand, the subject matter couldn't be sterner stuff: the human costs of war, the vagaries of survival. On the other hand, the novel radiates an ironic vibe too. It's almost as if the joke the cosmos is playing by repudiating the law of averages invites a jab of rebellion from Doig: he tries to find order again. Human beings try desperately to assign coherence and laws to our tenuous situation on this earth, but in the end, the "bitter arithmetic" adds up by rules we don't yet understand.

The Eleventh Man isn't without shortcomings, but its metaphysical ponderings, its remarkable reconnection with some facts about World War II that many have forgotten or never yet learned, and its memorable characters make it a worthy, meaty novel.

3.0 out of 5 stars believable characters, October 4, 2009

By	N. Keithley (Everett, Wa) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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This review is from: The Eleventh Man (Paperback)

the story had a belivable line to it. the chacters were people you would like to meet. The only part that left me hanging was the end. I felt like the author was trying to wrape it up and thats where it fell apart for me.