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Rape! Murder! Basketball!
April 16, 2007
The breathless promo copy for a recent Scribner galley went like this:
"With a story that could have been torn from the headlines, MVP takes a brutal, unblinking look at the ugliness that fuels our media-obsessed society, which churns out far too many scandals--real or alleged--by too many cardboard heroes."
(If I could find an animated .gif of a guy gesturing masturbatorily, I'd put it here. But I can't.)
Anyway, MVP is a debut novel by James Boice, a McSweeney's "New Writer" who had the peculiar pleasure of seeing an adaptation of his novel's prologue appear in Esquire. Thing is, the galley arrived way past our three-months-prior-to-pub-date deadline. A call to the publicist revealed that the galleys were held up because legal had to give the book an exhaustive read. Intriguing. This is, remember, a novel. A novel whose pro basketball star protagonist, Gilbert (!), plays for a fictional team. Of course, he also rapes and kills a woman on the first page and has a career arc not unlike Kobe Bryant's. Total coincidence, surely.
Now, I neither like nor understand sports. (Except darts. Darts are okay. Is there a novel of darts?) And anything blurbed by Chuck Klosterman is immediately suspect. So I was shocked when I realized I liked the book. It's really good. It's not gimmicky. It's going to get a lot of press, and it's going to sell a nutty number of copies. Maybe Scribner will get sued, but I doubt it.
That's all I got.
Posted by Jonathan Segura on April 16, 2007 | Comments (0)
