Finbar Connors plays professional football, but he isn’t a millionaire, nor is he a star. Instead he’s an aging wide receiver who has caught on as a player-coach with the Centerport Cossacks, a team in the upstart Northeast Football Association, in Larry Gaffney’s comedic novel “One Good Year.” By using football as a springboard to explore male camaraderie and the anxieties that surround it, Gaffney is able to balance crude humor with a nuanced portrayal of the acceptance of maturity.
Category Archives: Books
Harry Potter and the Banality of Evil
I resisted the Harry Potter juggernaut for a long time, partially because of my age, mostly out of willfulness (“Ain’t no best seller list gonna tell me what good readin’ is!” I reasoned). But when I finally fell, I fell hard, reading the entire Potter saga in the past year and a half. The fact that that was an easy task testifies to one of J.K. Rowling’s greatest strengths: she’s a page-turner, through and through. Each of her stories is propulsive, building to the point where you say, “Just one more chapter, and then I’m going to bed” and find yourself still reading three hours later.
That’s not to say Rowling is a perfect writer. Her emotional moments, while sincere, are often too on-the-nose, and her supporting characters are typically limited to their one note. Over the course of 4,100 pages, Hagrid, Dean Thomas, and Professor McGonagall fill the same roles, without any real sense of growth or indications of an internal landscape.