Chris Bachelder, _The Throwback Special_

 GLAD TO SEE this got some respectful attention (a National Book Award nomination); Bachelder has been one of the overlooked gems of American fiction for quite a while.

The novel has a very peculiar premise: 20-some American men get together once a year to re-enact the failed flea-flicker play (i.e., the titular "throwback special") in the course of which legendary Washington Redskin quarterback Joe Theismann suffered a career-ending leg injury after a tackle by legendary New York Giant linebacker Lawrence Taylor.

The re-created event occurred in 1985, about 30 years before the time the novel is set. We never find out when or how the men hit upon the idea of doing the re-enactment, or why they have been so faithful to it over so many years, or what they find meaningful about it. The tacit nature of the enterprise, the absence of speeches or explanations, struck me as a key element of the novel's portrait of American (white, middle-class) male-dom, with its fervency and commitments about things it will not and probably cannot explain. 

The re-enactments probably began when the men were young, maybe college-age, but in its current state the group gives Bachelder plenty of room to represent the contours of American middle-aged masculinity, about which he is so spot-on all I can say is "yikes."

Religions often include annual recallings, even symbolic re-enactments of significant, sometimes terrible events--Passover, Purim, Christmas, Easter, Muharram--so Bachelder also gives us (subtly, without anything overstated or even explicit) an insight into the origins of religions. The "why" of the re-enactment somehow involves Theismann's trauma, Taylor's remorse, something about our emotional investment in the spectacle of sports, something about the human ability to create symbol and allegory. In that respect, it put me a little in mind of Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. Bachelder's touch is a bit lighter and maybe a bit surer than Coover's (though I admire  both books).

An example of Bachelder's deftness: when the novel actually arrives at the climactic event of the re-enactment itself, Bachelder does not write from the point of view of any of the participants, but rather from that of some conference attendees (for "Prestige Vista Solutions") who just happen to be at the same hotel as the re-enactors that weekend. They are observing from a distance without knowing exactly what is going on. A surprising but perfect choice, making the re-enactment we have been waiting for for 200 pages seem mysterious, strange, comical but oddly fascinating. Who knows, one of these spectators to the bizarre ritual of these middle-aged men made be the next to take up the baton--may become, who knows, the Throwback Special's Paul.