From Publishers Weekly
Golf, as narrator Brian Schwan concedes in this comic novel, is a game with an alluring surface gentility: "the edgy murmur on the practice green; the weirdly purposeful clicks and thumps and grunts from the range." But underneath, there lurks obsession and, in his case, despair. First novelist Griffith's writing crackles with a lacerating humor from which nothing and no one is spared. Brian, 25, has gone from being his dad's little prodigy player to a second-tier professional, mired in the Snapper/Gold Club Tour. His "swan song" comes during the Ile de Paris tournament, held near Charleston, S.C. His long-suffering born-again wife, Rosa, has been making impatient sounds about Brian's selfishness: for four years she has put up with being a golf widow, but now she wants a child. She also wants her husband to confront reality and become an accountant. Brian is sure that his childhood friend and current golfing buddy, Hatch, is supplying Rosa with ammunition by back-channeling information to her about Brian's losses. Even his father has lost faith. The book starts with Brian shooting seven over par on the same day that "Bird" Soulsby, the mysterious South African golfer with whom he is paired, shoots an amazing 11 under par. On his way to his car, Brian is waylaid by Ellen McCovery, a lovely news reporter for a Charleston TV station. She mistakes him for Bird; he leaps at the chance to exchange places with a winner and maybe engage in an adulterous tryst. But Brian doesn't know yet what a strange character he is trying to impersonate. Griffith concocts a truly Nabokovian entertainment, which probes the twinned nature of winners and losers, the lore of the game and the eccentric subculture it spawnsAthough one needn't have the slightest interest in golf to be won over. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Golf novels tend to fall into one of two opposing camps: ribald comedy and pseudo-spiritual revery (see the read-alike column on the opposite page for examples). Griffith's debut effort falls nominally in the first camp, but there are significant differences: he's not out merely for jokes in the Dan Jenkins (
Dead Solid Perfect) manner; no, this is that rarest of breeds, the literary golf novel. The hero, Brian Schwan, a struggling pro hacking his way around the game's minitours (the lowest rung on the professional-golf ladder), is uniquely unsuited to his chosen career. Torn between his father's passion for golf and his mother's cultural aspirations, Schwan brings way too much mental baggage to the links, an environment forever hostile to ambiguity. As we watch Schwan's game, his marriage, and his life come unstuck in the course of what may be his last professional tournament, held at the Ile de Paris Golf & Beach Club in South Carolina, we can't help but sympathize with both the hero and his creator. Schwan, like Keats, is awash in negative capability, but there is no room for holding contrary thoughts in a mind that must focus on drawing a tee shot around a tight dogleg. Griffith, too, courts disaster by attempting to juggle opposites: he satirizes the minitours with Jenkins-like brio; he celebrates the wonder of golf with the intensity of Michael Murphy (
Golf in the Kingdom ); and he delivers a series of rambling, ironic, literary allusive monologues that recall Saul Bellow's Herzog in full cry. Does it all hold together? Not entirely, but like most rounds of golf, there are just enough superb moments to keep us wanting more.
Bill OttCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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