When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. 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 cease to consist of a series of small threats.”īachelder’s take on manhood is sharply observed and sympathetic and funny enough to win over even those readers who abhor football and its fans.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Another details a man’s attraction to the women pictured in illustrated children’s books. One conversation concerns those whose wives have asked them to sit while urinating.
Bachelder seems able to riff wryly on almost anything. Bachelder ( Abbott Awaits, 2011, etc.) looks at the strange, inane, and obvious things American males deem holy-as 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. 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. In their 17th annual gathering, 22 men arrive at a 2 ½– star hotel on U.S. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
