Pound for Pound

Starred review from May 15, 2006
Toole, who died before seeing the Oscar-winning movie adaptation of his short story "Million Dollar Baby," weighs in posthumously with this bruising smoker of a novel. (The novel was "shaped," notes James Ellroy in the introduction, from a 900-page manuscript by Toole's agent and a freelance editor.) Dan Cooley, a onetime contender who has outlived his wife and children and whose life revolves around his grandson, Tim Pat, goes off the rails after Tim Pat is killed in a traffic accident. As Cooley vacillates between booze-fueled suicidal thoughts and fantasies of homicidal vengeance, Hispanic teenager Eduardo "Chicky" Garza y Duffy begins his troubled ascent in the amateur boxing world. That these two men, separated by thousands of miles, ethnicity and generations, will become the vehicle for one another's redemption is inevitable, but Toole's unsentimental prose and knack for creating tragic characters (whose sufferings, in turn, lead to plausible triumphs) overcome the ready-made plot. Cooley's thesis—that prize fighting, for all its apparent brutality, is a sport that rewards wisdom, skill and (at times) fair play—informs Toole's writing; the result is a stunning cap to a short but brilliant writing career.