cover image PLAYING THROUGH: A Year of Life and Links Along the Scottish Coast

PLAYING THROUGH: A Year of Life and Links Along the Scottish Coast

Curtis Gillespie, . . Crown, $22.95 (288pp) ISBN 978-1-4000-5223-3

In a book that is part golf travelogue and part mushy memoir, Gillespie (The Progress of an Object in Motion ; Someone Like That ) uproots his family from their home in Edmonton, Canada, and moves to the coast of Scotland for a year to write and hit the links. Stitching together random memories, quaint observations on Scottish life, tributes to his deceased father, tidy domestic homilies and a sprinkling of golf yarns, Gillespie wanders across time and space, and generally gets entangled in the thicket of his own solipsism. Although he is intermittently humorous, charming and even moving, his earnest sentimentality smothers most of the book's touching moments and gives his anecdotes a manufactured, too-perfect quality. The most redeeming passages involve Gillespie's frequent golf partners, two crusty old men named Jack and Archie whose grouchy, plainspoken banter supplies a welcome respite. Although the writing is easygoing, there are some forced metaphors and a few genuine clunkers: "my tee shot, which had been little more than five yards off the fairway, had gone into an area of rough that seemed to be the site of some deeply twisted agricultural experiment to develop strains of vegetation that had learned to tie their stalks in knots." Readers looking for a book about golf or Scotland may be disappointed. Agent, Ann McDermid. (May)