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Shadow Box has much the same spirit. And with its month-before-Christmas publication date, it will be a boon to the gift wrap industry. Yet in many ways Plimpton is writing for a narrower audience in Shadow Box. The usual sports figures vie for attention with literary and journalistic personalities. Readers looking for another Paper Lion may be stymied by Plimpton's pages on the death fantasies of contemporary literatteurs and the last words of their historical counterparts. Plimpton seems to be aiming at a readership more cultivated, perhaps, than the TV audience Paper Lion hit; readers...
...Plimpton's subject matter may have dictated the change. Boxing has traditionally attracted a more unsavory following than the major team sports. Generally, its heroes have been hard-luck kids who apprenticed to the trade with bareknuckle street bouts, who became good fighters because they were hungry fighters. Historically, though, boxing fans have always included a contingent of aristocrats and writers. The boxing world will never have the wholesomeness of Monday night football, and Plimpton accepts this. He devotes more than a chapter to the story of a brazen stick-up at a post-fight party in Atlanta, at which...
...Plimpton's preoccupation with the death fantasies of his literary contemporaries makes one wonder: perhaps Plimpton is, despite his Peter Pan outlook on life, feeling the weight of his 50 years...
...death is always a subject with grim overtones, the approach to it in Shadow Box is typically Plimpton--light-hearted, open-minded, and fanciful. Worthy and characteristic "last moments" are contributed by the likes of Terry Southern, Charles Addams, Allen Ginsberg, and Jules Feiffer. Plimpton's own fantasy takes place in Yankee Stadium. As an outfielder he runs into one of the monuments that used to stand in deep center field...
Might there not be another, darker Plimpton hiding behind the genteel journalist-at-large who just happens to do unusual and sometimes dangerous things out of dedication to his line of work? Plimpton founded and was for a time editor of the Paris Review, which suggests literary ambitions greater than his success in the somewhat limited area of "participatory journalism." Yet not a hint of jealousy shows as he discusses the idiosyncrasies and foibles of great writers he has known--Hemingway, Mailer, Marianne Moore. Neither does Plimpton give himself the airs of a celebrity, though he is certainly more entitled...