Word: gents
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...recently read with considerable dismay Joe Dalton's review of Peter Gent's book, Texas Celebrity Turkey Trot, in the March 23 Crimson. Although I have not read Gent's book and thus have no comment about Dalton's treatment of it, there are enough gratuitous salvos against my home state of Texas in the course of the review to merit this response...
IDIGRESS: the novel. Peter Gent, a former Dallas Cowboys flankerback in the days of Don Meredith, is also the author of the steaming, apocalyptic, and very good North Dallas Forty, the best novel ever written about pro football, not as limited a field as you might imagine. Texas celebrity Turkey Trot, which was excerpted last small in Sports Illustrated, and will be called by many another pro football novel, is not quite as good, I am sad to report. Readers of the sports pages will want to pick out who its characters are based on. Since Gent's autobiographical hero...
...matter because although the action is provided by football, this is much more a novel of Texas society, it its own way as interesting as Blood and Money. Thompson's exploration of murder among Houston's very rich. Gent excels at capturing vignettes of that life--the celebrity fishing tournament, a Dallas businessman winking over hiscoke spoon the while his Mercedes is stopped at a traffic light. And Gent tries mightily to give the book some vision, tying his Neiman-Marcus set into a cocaine smuggling ring of heroic proportions, furnishing it with an ex-astronaut lackey who becomes...
...GENT'S going over ground trod much more surely, if not as entertainingly, by Don DeLillo in End Zone, and in the end his version of po' boys at play in the fields (and beds) of the energy lords rings more than a tiny bit hollow. The cornerback, Jenkins, realizes the decrepitude of the crew he runs with, but he wants to run a little longer; he never comes to the realization the protagonist of North Dallas Forty did, namely, that there comes a time to put away childish things Mabry Jenkins is alienated from his work place, but nailing...
...rather a fun book. In the meantime Gent has learned to write, and his ear for redneck, dialogue is acute. Samples "I'll rip off your head and shit in your neck...", "Do you eat with niggers...