There’s something strangely compelling about wrestling in fiction. I’ve noticed it while reading the very excellent Gimmicks and decided to test the theory with this book. Admittedly, a considerably less excellent boo, but nevertheless the wrestling components were fun. The rest was somewhat brought down by a personal dislike of the main character, who I’m pretty sure was designed to be likeable.
Mind you, Ricky isn’t a total sh*t, he’s even mildly amusing at times, but overall he’s tediously immature, brash, foul tempered, shortfused manchild that throughout the novel is essentially dragged kicking and screaming into something resembling adulthood. Now having typed all of that up, it’s obvious he definitely has the personality for wrestling, if maybe not the discipline. Then again, all of that is rendered irrelevant, because Ricky goes down in act one, chapter one, in fact, and stays down for the count. Temporarily disabled to a life changing degree, he can no longer wrestle or do his day job as a high school janitor, he ends his relationship with his beloved girlfriend when she very reasonably decides this isn’t the right time for them to have a child and gets an abortion and now all Ricky has is his Gilmore Girl tinged relationship with his mom, who has had him young and an absentee relationship with his father, whom Ricky has never known, but through whom he has always claimed a 50% Native American inheritance. In fact, the latter has been an indelible aspect of both Ricky’s personality and his wrestling persona. This is all despite the fact that he looks as white as wonderbread. And then Ricky finds out that the man he has always been so proud to claim as his father might not have been that at all and begins to spiral like a top, unmoored from his personal mythology of birthright. And the novel becomes one of those…will Ricky get his sh*t together sort of things. Which, of course, he has to, more or less, to meet the classic three act literary composition. So there you have it, a fun read, a read where the narrative is more fun than the characters, unless I’m not quite understanding or appreciative of that flat midwestern, specifically Nebraskan, mentality. A reasonably entertaining read despite its bratty lead. Something of a belated coming of age story. Reads quickly and easily. Thanks Netgalley.
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