Summary
Ownie Flanagan is a trainer and Second World War vet who once had a fighter almost reach a world title. In a boxing world that's been in a death spiral since the retirement of Muhammad Ali, he's just waiting for one last chance to train a great fighter, and gets it in the form of a mercurial Trinidadian named Turmoil Davies.
It's a book of caricatures and even grotesques, filled with descriptions like this one, of a fat cleaning woman: "the bones in her face had vanished like twigs in a pit of human quicksand" and this depiction of lumpenproles at the beach: "clad in cut-off jeans, the men churned up the water in furious imitations of the overhead crawl, pulled up exhausted, then performed raucous dives, the kind that led to spinal injuries."There's also some lovely characterization through dialogue, such as this meditation from a secondary character, a not-very-ambitious boxer and would-be singer named Johnny LeBlanc: "If I'm in a city with subways, I feel like I'm going somewhere. And Italians. I like a place big enough to have Italians."See the full content of this document
Extract
Comic Novel Delivers One-Two Punch
Going Fast
By Elaine McCluskeyGoose Lane Editions, 376 pages, $23Elegy and comedy are strange bedfellows, but this comic novel set mostly in the Halifax area in the early 1990s combin...See the full content of this document
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