Drive

by Rob Roberge

What Fat City did for club boxing, taking it and using the profession to expose and explore the men and women who live, love and ultimately tend to lose at society’s fringes, Roberge does here in Drive. This is a dark, funny, compassionate novel from a writer who has been called "...the laureate of that marginalized demographic, a professor of the articulately disenfranchised..."

124 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Patrick O'Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible use of language and beautifully structured prose is what's going on in Rob Roberge's Drive. And even though the book's characters are the coach and players of a bush league basketball team - as well as some hangers on and a blind cow in heat - you don't have to be interested in basketball. Because it's not really about basketball. It's about people, relationships, fears, and desires. And then, as I've already said, there's the words and syntax that just flow out of Roberge like it's so goddamn easy. I can only say that the sheer pleasure I received from reading Drive is the closest I've come to smoking a cigarette, while getting a blow job, as a shitload of opiates creep into my brain, on a warm beautiful day, and... Well, you get the picture. There are some books that just do this for me, although I can't remember the last one that did it as well as Drive.

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 5 out of 5]

DRIVE is a novel that looked beyond the myths we create for ourselves. Team sports have taken such an important place in our culture, the easy thing to do became to kick back and judge it as a product, but DRIVE goes beyond that and presents a super-duper empathic vision of how the sport and all its hopes and promises, shape individual.

Like all great novels, it's also more than that. Rob Roberge has an uncanny gift for finding these moments where life seems to write itself before you and to find the right characters to give these moments too. It's a moving, yet realistic optimistic novel. It's never over when you don't give up. When you put yourself in the way of the world and keep and open mind, you will go places you never thought you did.

I thoroughly enjoyed DRIVE. It captures both reality and social myhs in a jar, for our entertainment.

[Romero Nickell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely simmering prose. One of the most technically accurate basketball books you will read, though sport is just the vehicle Roberge uses to unravel a cast of characters that are flawed, humorous, contemplative, and unforgettable. This book has the pace of a basketball game- there is a beat and rhythm to it that makes it hard to put down.

[Antonia Crane · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Drive” is my latest appendage. I keep it within spitting distance and pick it up as a map to lead me to a great story. I open it up to inspire me, show me how to write a tense and wonderful scene and re-read certain sentences. In Rob Roberge’s capable hands, basketball sounds like Beethoven and women are hot PhD-wielding topless cleaners or brilliant chick basketball stars with wrenches who know how to jimmie a starter. “Drive” has all of the humor of” More Than They Can Chew” minus the camp. Though the backdrop is a rogue Gulf Coast basketball team, it’s more about the struggles and irresistible urges that drive people to survive and connect. Coach Ben Thompson’s voice drives the plot, but the pages turn because of Roberge’s players who one by one get under the reader’s skin. Uncle Chicken, the Daddy Warbuck’s symbol of all things corporate and disgusting is truly Robergian: creepy, sexy and weird. Bone, Money and Hedda are in turns dignified and defiant. As for the writing, Roberge’s sentences sing. They’re thoughtful and compelling from the snappy dialogue that erupts from the characters to tense scenes with Sean and Uncle Chicken. In the end, it’s Ben Thompson’s twisted, big-hearted thoughts that leave an after taste. You can smell the room that Ben Thompson tries to sleep in and you can hear the cow hitting the wall- “a tortured and lonely sound.”

[Steven Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

and excellent novel and a fast read. although it is pushed as a basketball story, it is really more about the characters, their lives, addictions, downfalls, and successes; it just so happens that they play basketball for a living. Roberge has an incredible talent for weaving tales of underdogs striving for their moment in the sun - though you suspect that they may not make it there, you find yourself cheering them on as you turn each page. Rob's ability to create memorable characters, and his dark, sometimes twisted, sense of humor will keep you sucked in until the last page.

[Silas · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible read. And I have a signed first edition that was published by Doublewide Press!

[Adam J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really, really liked this book. Thought - provoking with great character development.