The Big Game Is Every Night
In Robert Maynor’s engaging novel The Big Game Is Every Night, a broken leg changes the life of a teenage boy in the rural American South, leaving him to navigate the everyday violence of his surroundings.
A star running back on a strong football team, Grady is at many a crossroads. He beat out a senior teammate for the starting spot. His favorite class is geometry because of its strict rules and black-and-white answers. With his abusive father living with a new family and never around, and his mother working most of the time, Grady needs the focus that football gives him—until a hard hit while he’s standing on the sideline knocks him out for the season.
Floating without the camaraderie and structure of the football team, Grady begins hanging out with Hambone, a sociopath who drags him down into a world of hunting, drugs, offroading, and nihilism. He stops returning calls from his supportive cousin, or even from the girl he likes. His return to working out with the team brings up more tensions, and things get bad enough that his father gets involved.
The domino effect of his football injury, and his reaction to it, keeps Grady in the orbit of violent men who want him to be more like them, and his often passive nature pushes him ever closer to that edge. Faced with the kind of toxic man he can become, he wonders whether to avoid the easy temptation of sliding into that role. That push and pull between those who care about him and those who see masculinity as violent and deranged drives the story.
The Big Game Is Every Night is a Southern coming-of-age novel that grapples with serious questions about the difference between being a man and being a good man.
Reviewed by
Jeff Fleischer
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