The Pint Man

December 21, 2009
The first novel from former Sports Illustrated
columnist Rushin joins other works of pub fiction, yet it's the wordplay—not the alcohol consumption—that drives the novel. Rodney Poole is unemployed, spends much of his time at New York bar Boyle's, and has had only one serious girlfriend. Change is in the air as Rodney's best friend prepares to move to Chicago and Rodney meets a woman named Mairead (who appears to actually like him); even his prospects of finding a job are looking up. It's not a plot-heavy novel, with much of its suspense revolving around a mysteriously disappearing and reappearing U-Haul truck and the question of whether two bullies schooled by Rodney will show up at Boyle's again. What sets the work apart is Rodney's sharp wit. Praised for is “verbal ambidexterity,” Rodney loves wordplay as much as he loves beer, as is amply demonstrated in his wooing of Mairead. The banter is funny enough to make the reader look past the novel's defects, and Rushin emerges as one of the sharpest wits on the scene.

January 1, 2010
Rushin's first novel revels in wordplay and pub culture but skimps on everything else.

That guy at the bar doing the crossword, a pint of Guinness at his elbow, is indulging in his two greatest pleasures. Rodney Poole is a regular at Boyle's, a Manhattan dive that is more home to him than his dirty shoebox of an apartment. Here he can banter with the other regulars and Armen the Barman. With the ladies, Rodney's on less firm ground; his last date was ruined by a misunderstood palindrome. However, change is coming for this unemployed 34-year-old. Keith, his drinking buddy since college, is leaving for Chicago and marriage, but has set him up with a blind date. Mairead can look Rodney in the eye (she's six feet to his six-five), and she shares his love of words, so they may have a future. Romancing her and tending to Keith, who broke his foot during a run-in at the bar, is about all the action Rodney gets in this sliver of a story, which often stops cold so the omniscient narrator can pass along the words of Orwell, Camus and Fitzgerald. Former Sports Illustrated columnist Rushin (The Caddie Was a Reindeer, 2004, etc.) makes an awkward transition to fiction. When he's not dropping literary names, he's filling in the narrative gaps with fart jokes and close-ups of toilets. He doesn't fare much better with characterization, especially that of his protagonist: Rodney is a generic, educated slob, a pale shadow of the better-specified Ignatius J. Reilly in Confederacy of Dunces.

There are some flashes of wit—Rodney tells Mairead, a stickler for correct use of apostrophes,"you're beautiful when you're pedantic"—but they blur into a comic monologue too eager to please.

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February 1, 2010
Rushin, a former Sports Illustrated columnist and the author of The Caddie Was a Reindeer (2004), has written an exceedingly enjoyable first novel. It concerns unemployed 34-year-old Rodney Poole, a regular at Boyles Irish Pub in New York City, who wonders whether he is a descendant of the fabled pintmen of Dublin or merely a run-of-the-mill drunk. Over the course of the book, he sees one friend off to marriage, loses another to death, and falls in love with the career-oriented Maireadwho, naturally, sees potential in Rodney that he is blind to. But while the basic premise of the book is nothing newits a coming-of-age tale, even if it starts at a later age than usualits Rushins narrative voice, guileless, digressive, and ribald, riddled with wordplay and trivia, that makes this such a pleasure. Some readers may grow impatient, as Pint Man doesnt travel very far and it takes its sweet time getting there, but its great company for an evening, with or without a pint at your elbow.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)