Customer Reviews

Whompyjawed

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This book is quite a hoot, and well written too. I enjoyed the fluidity of the language, not to mention the loose narrative style of Whompyjawed. There's much to praise about Mitch Cullin's first novel, but I'll simply say that it is funny, honest, and at times very tender. And I was glad that it wasn't all about football!

Told with from the perspective of a high school football player, Whompyjawed is an honest, engaging, and truthful account of teenage angst, confusion, and questioning. Rather than gloss over or play down the multitude of conflicting feelings young men feel, the author displays them without making excuses. Overall, it is a funny, sometimes sad, and good novel with characters that are finely drawn and believable. I recommend this book to both teenagers and high school teachers, as it gives some needed insight to the problems young men are facing in this uncertain age.

I really enjoyed this read. It's light yet insightful. With a lauguage of its own, Mr. Cullin captured the essence of the small town and the lonliness of growing up with great sensitivity, humor, and above all, honesty. Like "This Boy's Life" and "Catcher in the Rye", this is a must read.

Written with a unique voice and evocative sense of place, Mitch Cullin's debut novel, "Whompyjawed," is a complete triumph. The novel focuses on the inchoate and often inarticulatge yearnings and existential questioning of its protagonist, Willy Keeler, whose prowess in high-school football affords him the opportunity to escape the prospects of a dead-end life in Claude, Texas. "Whompyjawed" gains its stature from its reliance on the compelling, believable and authentic voice of its protagonist; Willy not only plays a great game on the gridiron, he speaks a great game as well, whether it be through his many internal monologues or external conversations with a series of memorable secondary characters who help compose the texture of his life. Cullin's memorable description of Claude, once fefined as the "real ass of nowhere," could well be compared with the atmosphere established in Larry McMurtry's "The Last Picture Show," Kent Haruf's "Plainsong" or Larry Watson's "Montana, 1948."

It would be all to easy to caricaturize Willy Keeler's life: star football player, dates the gorgeous but virginal daughter of a repressive high-school principal, reluctant victim of paternal abandonment, observer of family disintegration, unknowing pawn of his football coach who is simultaneously paternalistic and cynically manipulative. These truths, however, grossly simplify the complexity and depth of the protagonist's life. Keeler, despite every inducement to play it safe, constantly questions his actions and tries to invent acceptable understandings of his life's direction. Football, Texas style, becomes a powerful metaphor of competition, deception and self-definition. Coach Bud's professed concern for Willy's future unravels under championship pressure; the adult's supposed maturity disintegrates as he blandly risks Willy's health for victory. Ultimately, Cullin destroys our culture's image of high-schoool football coaches as role models for innocent youth.

Willy's increased disaffection with his high-school sweetheart, Hanna, leads to a powerful sexual fantasy and attachment to one of his mother's abused, broken friends. The author's treatment of adult and adolescent sexuality is one of the novel's special achievements. As well, Cullin sympathetically examines the multi-faceted and disastrous consequences of a fractured family. In a manner reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson in "Winesburg, Ohio," the characters in "Whompyjawed" suddenly and unpredictably become alive to each other, briefly, but powerfully, illuminating their deepest selves to each other. Willy's mother's brief and pain-saturated soliloquy about her family's past is perhaps the best of many epiphanies streaking across the novel's pages.

Though many of the moments of this novel are whompyjawed askew -- odd or off-centered -- the novel rings true. "Whompyjawed" will remain with the reader long after its conclusion.

Whompyjawed, a regionalism meaning askew, is both the title of Mitch Cullin's engaging debut novel and descriptive of his protagonist's young life, although it's hard to believe anything could be out of sync in somnambulant, backwater Claude, Texas.

After all, Claude, which plays as important a role in Whompyjawed as the characters, "is nothing more than a scar widening that stretch of blacktop bypass known as U.S. 287." It's a land poor place where the one after midnight gathering spot is the Coke machine in front of Fontane's filling station. Claude is a town that shuts down on game night to head for the WPA football field.

Or, as 18-year-old Willy Keeler puts it, "...dusk settles over the deserted Main Street with only the blinking of a single yellow light that sort of marks the center of Claude. And with the wind blowing dust and bits of trash along the sidewalks and gutters downtown, not a soul in sight....Even the domino parlor gets dark."

Willy should know because he's the star of the Claude Fighting Tigers, big time pro recruitment fodder, Coach Bud's golden boy, big brother to introverted, scholarly Joel, and ardent pursuer of Hanna, the high school principal's daughter. She is "fine in her Wranglers and school jacket," reminding him of "that actress in the movie Splash, the one who was the mermaid, except her lips are thinner and her hair is brown."

Outside of Coach Bud's pontifications and the adolescent, testosterone enhanced wisdom of his buddies, Sammy and Lee, there's aught to guide Willy as he tries to plan for his future. He lives with his beer drinking mother and her boyfriend, Stump, "the nearest thing to a father Joel and I got, except for our real father who's a bum."

Confused, sometimes "downright depressed about everything," Willy may climb to the top of the town's water tower, where he sits with his legs dangling over the catwalk. From that vantage point he can relive the last game, ponder Coach Bud's latest advice, ruminate about tomorrow, get riled because Hanna won't acquiesce, and survey Claude "which ain't nothing more than a few hundred fluorescent lights hanging over them dim streets."

Perplexed and frustrated by his burgeoning sexuality Willy has an unexpected and embarrassing encounter with a fellow classmate, then drives to Amarillo, to the seedy Royal Hotel and the arms of Ramona, a friend of his mother's.

Willy's search for meaning seems futile; he turns up few answers. Yet, during his last summer in Claude, he concludes, "The best thing to do is take care of yourself, be decent, keep running forward."

With this incredibly touching coming-of-age story Mitch Cullin has mirrored the adolescent experiences of millions, and offered a memorable tableau of fast disappearing rural America. He employs the West Texas vernacular with skill, and creates some of the most enduring, lovable characters to be found. Whompyjawed , the first of a trilogy, is a delight, superbly crafted, rich with humor and hope. It leaves one eager for Cullin's second Texas tale, Branches, to be published next year.

- Gail Cooke

A warm, dry wind blows through Mitch Cullin's debut novel of the modern west. Only a few American writers--Tom Drury and Cormac McCarthy, for example--present rural lives so plainly and imaginatively, and with such scrupulous adherence to the details of fading places still very much alive.

...Whompyjawed does not describe a world I want to live in; it's a nightmare. The girlfriend is a date rape victim, not a virginally, repressed teenager. So I assume, by "sexual fantasy" you are referring to the attempted date rape scene. Ramona is a battered prostitue, not a temptress or good friend of the mother. Mom is not a waitress unless that is a new name for a hooker, especially on tax return forms.

There are many journeys through books that I want to take; this book is not one of them. If you find yourself wading through this violent roadtrip, choose an exit ramp as quickly as possible.