A Natural

August 28, 2017
This slow-building novel examines the unique pressures and trappings of the hypermasculine world of professional English soccer. After being cut from the national youth team, 19-year-old Tom reluctantly signs with Town, a middling squad floundering at the bottom of its division. There, Tom still fights for playing time alongside Easter, the team’s underperforming captain, who has a bad habit of reading message boards after losses. Most of the narrative bounces back and forth between Tom and Easter’s wife, Leah, a young mother painfully alone in her marriage. The author skillfully interweaves both characters’ feelings of isolation, setting up a number of strong reveals with impressive restraint and control. Once Easter goes down with a devastating leg injury, the disintegration of his and Leah’s marriage dovetails with Tom’s burgeoning relationship. The resolution of both stories is suitably heartbreaking, but the implications resolve themselves too quickly in a rushed ending that feels out of place in a novel whose power resides in authorial deliberateness. Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile sports novel with winning characters.

Tom Pearman, a gay soccer player who has been demoted from one league to another, falls into a relationship with another player. Narrator Shaun Grindell does his best to capture the emotions of these characters. But minor characters shine more brightly than the protagonist, whose equivocal dialogue is much more subtle than that of the more gregarious coaches, a father, a player's wife, and others. The story delves into the players' lives off the field, and Grindell does a decent job of helping listeners keep the characters straight. He varies voices and lends a certain frustrated energy to appropriate moments. Listeners shouldn't expect a big-game ending, but those interested in the evolution of a relationship--one that is not all that common--may enjoy this. M.B. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine