Word: reader
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Season Inside, Feinstein takes the reader on a journey through the 1987-88 college basketball season--the year of Manning and Larry Brown, Kerr and the Arizona squad, and Rollie Massimino's return to the NCAA Tournament...
...reader gets to know how coaches feel about their jobs and their players, and how players respond to the pressures of basketball...
...importance of France is clear in rehearsal photos too, but elsewhere the reader could wish that Fraser and Arnold had checked in more with each other. The pictures show that ballet master David Richardson is part of the inner circle, but he doesn't figure in the text. The tart voice of corps member Ty Granaroli is invigorating, but there is no captioned picture of him. But then, some of the best shots are of dancers with their dogs, hauled along on the lonely tours. And the piles of pointe shoes, grubby, used-up torture instruments. A ballerina...
MCELROY writes in a first-person stream of consciousness that draws in the reader, seeming to replicate the confused and wandering form that a child's thoughts might plausibly take after a parent's death. At times the style grows annnoyingly Salinger-esque, and is peppered with italics and occasional self-conscious introspection: "And I said, `My father passed away last night.' I who of all people know enough to say 'died': yet said `passed away."' But for the most part the flow of free association is effective...
...novel is an enveloping glimpse into the soul of a teenaged boy baffled by the effects of death on his mind and world. McElroy's drifting, almost careless stream of consciousness adds credence to his hero's words. The reader is drawn into the boy's mind, and follows his leaps from bemusement to reminiscence to stark realization of death's actuality. What began as an elegy for the father develops into a journal documenting the son's progression into maturity even as the letter progresses into wider and wider circles of society...