MVP: A Novel [Paperback]

James Boice (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 8, 2007

Superstar Gilbert Marcus rapes and kills a young woman in a hotel room during the off-season. That's the prologue. MVP is Marcus's life story from conception to his act of incredible violence. Raised an only child -- the son of a difficult and demanding father -- Gilbert Marcus, a basketball player with extraordinary skill, is expected to be the greatest. His life is one of both excessive privilege and immutable obligation. He becomes a monster. James Boice is a startling and exciting new voice in fiction, and MVP is his ambitious and fascinating debut.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This stunning debut from Boice opens with Gilbert, a pro basketball star, raping and murdering a young woman in a Las Vegas resort. Boice then circles back to an account of Gilbert's warped life, largely spent beneath the demanding thumb of Gilbert's washed-up ballplayer father, Mervin, who sees in Gilbert a chance to capture the greatness that eluded him. Thus, Gilbert endures a regimen of awful health food (Mervin: "Death begins in the colon!") and endless drills (running alongside his father's car in the dark while Mervin throws coins at his head). Gilbert jumps straight from high school to the pros, where he racks up championships and MVP awards and secures global superstardom while still just an insecure (yet grossly narcissistic) man-child who is both seduced and tormented by the sex- and celebrity-obsessed culture he sits atop. Changing fortune brings a tanking team, a nationally televised humiliation, and money and marital problems, and the cracks in Gilbert's psyche begin to spread ominously. When Boice revisits that night in the Vegas hotel room, Gilbert's path from a lonely, sensitive boy to the monster choking an unnamed girl is clear, convincing and shocking. With its bristling intelligence and crystalline prose, this provocative novel secures Boice's status as a player to watch. (May)
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Review

"Boice's prose grabs you and never lets go....MVP is the start of something big."

-- Orlando Sentinel

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Product Details

• Paperback: 346 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; Original edition (May 8, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743292995
• ISBN-13: 978-0743292993
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,391,455 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

James Boice was born in 1982 in Salinas, California and grew up in northern Virginia. The Good and the Ghastly is his third novel. His first two were the critically acclaimed MVP and NoVA. His work has appeared in Esquire, McSweeney's, Fiction, Salt Hill, and other publications. He dropped out of college after three weeks to be a writer. He would rather you buy his books from an indie bookstore--because Amazon homogenizes and demeans literature with its star system, sales rank feature, and Kindle's typeface uniformity. And they do not pay sales tax. And they actively harm local independent business. JamesBoice.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary Book by an Extraordinary Author, May 15, 2007

By 

Kindle Reader (Louisville KY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: MVP: A Novel (Paperback)

The author of MVP is surely one of the finest writers around -- for instance, who else could describe two hefty female white airline employees as "women who know how to properly train big dogs and keep sliced deli meat in the fridge." His writing about the lead-up to 9-11 is haunting. Overall this is a very fine piece of fiction, one of the best I have read in years. It is a shame that so far the main stream book reviewers have all but ignored it. This book ranks leagues ahead of our "best sellers" today.

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars No creativity, July 10, 2007

By 

Baretta (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: MVP: A Novel (Paperback)

The main character of the novel is Gilbert Marcus who is a very thinly disguised Kobe Bryant with Tiger Wood's ethnicity, childhood and white wife woven into a basketball story. Far too much of the novel is regurgitation of real life events with window dressing details changed. There are some wonderful passages and some well crafted prose but it is buried under tons of drivel. Through much of the novel, I felt that Boice's voice was false and that his writing demonstrated a lack of life experiences.

Boice made very little effort to be original in his characters or plot, and I suspect he was forced by the legal department at Scribner to change some details and names prior to publication. Key characters are really Shaquille O'Neal, Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan, etc. Many of the events and details are verbatim while almost all of the rest suffer just enough minor changes to create plausible deniability. I feel this approach to a novel is very lazy and does not bode well for future efforts.

I did find the psychological thread in the novel to be engaging but again Boice used stereotypical frameworks to explain his characters flaws. The novel struck me as a rehabilitative effort for the Kobe franchise (and other degenerate athletes) by creating a physiological justification for his "crime" rooted in a flawed childhood. But the author undermines even that foundation by creating a religious-like zeal in Gilbert's father, Mervin. By the time of the crime, Mervin has cut ties with Gilbert because Gilbert is not living his life in a manner consistent with Mervin's values. Clearly, Mervin is not responsible for Gilbert's failings. What is more obvious and only half-heartedly addressed in the novel is that money and power are the real corrupting influences.

6 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars RICK SHAQ GOLDSTEIN SAYS: "IS THE WRITING STYLE UNIQUE? DIFFERENT? OR WHAT? YOU DECIDE.", July 21, 2007

By 

Rick Shaq Goldstein "*SHAQ*" (Danville, Ca, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: MVP: A Novel (Paperback)

I've tried very hard, to try to come to a single definition, of the writing style of this author. But I cannot narrow it down, past the following three: 1) Like playing jazz with no rehearsal. 2) A poetry reading by a 1950's beatnik. 3) He's on speed. This novel is obviously based on Kobe Bryant's life, which obviously entails including SHAQ in the story midway through. The second irritant, in the telling of this story, is the fact, that sometimes he uses real names, and sometimes he doesn't. The main character (Kobe) is Gilbert Marcus. The SHAQ character is called, Papa Bear Ben Jermaine. Now, being that this is a novel, this would normally not be a problem, but the author, then uses the real names of people such as Larry Bird, Julius Erving, and Magic Johnson. And there are some very nasty and negative things said about Magic. So, if the author can use their names, why can't he use the other names? If that isn't confusing enough. Then, instead of using real team names, such as the Boston Celtics (Larry Bird's team of course!) he uses the Boston Colonials. Instead of the San Antonio Spurs, he uses the San Antonio Ramblers. The author describes, in almost exact detail what Ron Artest had done, but gives him the name Ron Harrington. Again, this would be fine, if he didn't also use Bird's, Magic's, and Erving's real names. It's a contradiction in the story, and makes the reader, a little leery, to buy into the story fully. At one point, the author states: "The team was running slick greased with diesel fuel." "DIESEL" of course, as any knowledgeable basketball fan would know, is one of Shaq's nicknames! Why not make a commitment to using all real names, or using all fake names? Another, less than concealed real name reference, are all the reference's to Darren Dickinson, who it's even more obvious, is Michael Jordan, than even the fact that, Gilbert Marcus is Kobe. Another habit of the author, that may not make this an enjoyable read for potential readers, is the fact, that the author describes things in 20 sentences, that can be described in 3. He makes every 100 yard dash into a marathon. It should be noted for potential readers, that this entire story, has a backdrop of deviant sexuality. There is as much written about this type of sex, as there is written about basketball. Lost, in the middle, of all the previously described habits, are some pretty interesting scenes, but their power, is diminished, due to the style of writing.