Winter Dreams

March 8, 2004
The quixotic, labyrinthine search for love is the subject of this latest novel by Snyder (Fallen Angel
, etc.), in which a college professor struggles to find his romantic destiny after meeting and losing the woman of his dreams. Sweet, shy, golf-obsessed Ross Lansdale survives a lonely childhood in an Illinois orphanage to land a job as an English professor at a Massachusetts state college. Ross's life seems complete when he falls for Julia Peterson, a comely Smith student, but Julia has promised herself to a young soldier named Jack, who is stationed in Germany during the Vietnam War. She eventually succumbs to her attraction to Ross, then gets pregnant and vanishes from his life. Shattered by the experience, Ross falls into an equally problematic entanglement after he is befriended by handsome Johnny Durocher, a hot young writer and ace golfer who has just ridden a well-received first novel into a teaching position in Ross's department. The combination of Johnny's writer's block and his guilt over injuring his sister in a car accident in which he was driving renders Johnny virtually unable to function, much to the dismay of his beautiful wife, Linda, who turns to Ross for help in caring for the couple's children. At the novel's surprising, elegiac conclusion, Ross journeys to Scotland to play a round of golf in Johnny's honor, and finally learns what happened to Julia. The golf writing sits uneasily with the romance, and Snyder often swerves into sentimentality, but some deft writing about love and loss provides crucial ballast.

February 15, 2004
This is a novel about love-two-thirds of it the human kind. Ross Lansdale, a young English professor orphaned as a child, enters his first adult relationship with adventurous undergrad Julia. When the pregnant Julia leaves him, he is befriended by new hotshot prof Johnny Durocher, who is troubled, plagiarism prone, and a crack golfer (Ross learned to love the game from a Brother at his orphanage). Accident (suicide?) soon takes Johnny, and Ross is taken with his widow, Linda, and children; then, mysteriously (to the reader), he suddenly quits his job and returns to the orphanage to teach. OK, there's the two-thirds. Eleven years later, Linda gives Ross Johnny's invitation to the Christmas Invitational at the grand old links in Scotland. Impersonating the dead Johnny, Ross tunes up his game and goes. Snyder's love of golf is evident, and the golf writing is exceptional, but the book as a whole should have lined up its audience as well as its long irons. The romance writing (sometimes coy) will leave avid golfers cold, and the golf writing will land romance readers in the rough. Enjoyable, especially the golf third, but optional.-Robert E. Brown, Minoa Lib., NY

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2004
In his latest novel, Snyder (" Fallen Angel," 2001) constructs a golf-is-life rubric and, in the process, creates a memorably, dismally lonely protagonist. Ross Lansdale, raised in an orphanage, now finds himself teaching literature at a Massachusetts university, circa 1969. One day at golf practice, he hits the ball and causes a train wreck, but the accident brings photographer Julia into his life. And a train wreck is what their romance becomes, with a pregnant Julia fleeing in midnovel, returning a dozen years later at story's end to explain things to Ross. Meanwhile, befriending new faculty colleague Johnny Durocher, married with raucous children, just deepens Ross' moroseness. Prior to his death in an automobile accident, Durocher confided that his name was on a lottery list for golfing at the sport's sacred shrine, the Old Course of the Royal and Ancient Club in Scotland. Ross inherits Durocher's slot and there tinkers with his swing and his sadness. Readers with a taste for the golfing motif will best like Snyder's quiet, introspective hero.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)