Season of Gene: A Novel

by Dallas Hudgens

Somewhere between incarceration and sainthood stands Joe Rice, a man who relishes peace, painkillers, and his Friday-night baseball league. When his shady business partner Gene dies rounding the bases, Joe knows this isn't going to be an ordinary season. Soon enough, a suburban ex-mobster, his entrepreneurial son, and a gun-toting minister have Tasered, maced and harassed Joe over the location of a three-million-dollar Babe Ruth baseball bat he doesn't know anything about.

Joe just wants to save his car-detailing/ticker brokerage business from Gene's mountain of debt, crime and craziness. (Winning a game of Madden NFGL against his ex-girlfriend's twelve-year-old son would also be a relief.) But first, he must confront the ghosts of his past - namely, his murdered uncle and his mentally unstable mother. He must also deal with the present, navigating the space between the two women he cares about. And finally, he must face the future, every man's least favorite obstacle.

Dallas Hudgens, the acclaimed author of Drive Like Hell , blends Guatemalan chicken, online pharmaceuticals, and unforgettable characters in a raucous but moving story of love and baseball. Season of Gene is a wild ride of a novel about a troubled man, the troubled women who love him and a legendary baseball bat that could either save their lives or get them killed.

Genres: Sports, Fiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 2007

About the author

Dallas Hudgens is the author of the short-story collection "Wake Up, We're Here" (Relegation Books, 2012), and the novels “Drive Like Hell” (Scribner, 2005), a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, and “Season of Gene” (Scribner, 2007), a Book Sense Notable.

Reviews

[Kip · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first glance, Season Of Gene is a fairly lightweight bro-farce about almost-middle-aged men acting like teenagers. And if it were made into a movie (and it almost seems written specifically with an eye toward screen adaptation), that’s probably where it would stop. But, like Dallas Hudgens’s other novel Drive Like Hell, there’s a darkness bubbling just under the surface that takes the book to another level.

Our narrator is Joe Rice, thirty-something manager of a recreational baseball team in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. The story opens on a hot, late-summer evening when Joe’s best friend, teammate and sort-of business partner Gene dies of a heart attack during a ballgame. Of course, being the irresponsible man-child that he was, Gene left his affairs in a shambles, and Joe steps in to try to straighten things out. This is partly because he has a good heart, and partly because, almost immediately, he finds himself harassed by various people who are after a very special baseball bat Gene owned. This is the bat Babe Ruth used to hit his famous “called shot,” and it quickly becomes the McGuffin of the story as everyone tries to get hold of it. So on one level, we have a goofy caper designed for guys who don’t like to read, a wild chase loaded with sports references.

The action may take place in well-to-do Northern Virginia, but Joe and his friends inhabit a seedier, parallel world; Gene himself lives in a “nice” development, but it’s so far out in the ‘burbs it’s almost in West Virginia. And Joe is not exactly a clean-cut hero beset by the forces of evil. He might be a business owner, but he is hardly the “passionate entrepreneur” you see in the smarmy commercials for office-supply stores. Creeping toward forty, Joe has a dysfunctional childhood and a prison record and a worrisome fondness for painkillers, and he runs a car-detailing operation kept afloat on credit and supplemented by ticket-scalping. His wardrobe consists almost entirely of sports gear, and he plays video games and online fantasy sports like a kid. All the women in his life treat him with the same vague disappointment. It’s easy to see him as pathetic, but here’s the thing: Joe knows this. He’s fully aware that he’s a “loser.” He sees the symbols of “success” all around him, and yet he knows these are things other people get to have, not him. But he has sports, baseball specifically, the one thing he’s always been able to count on in his life. Seen this way, his juvenile obsession is completely understandable. Women leave you, you owe everyone money, your best friend is dead, but you’ve still got baseball. Or heavy metal. Or science fiction. Or whatever – something that spoke to you when you were young and has always been there when you need it. At one point, Joe and Gene’s widow Joy talk about religion. It’s not his jam, but you can see he uses sports in a lot of the same ways others use their faith, both as a way to frame big questions but also to keep him going from one day to the next. And that’s absolutely fine. And so Joe keeps pushing, trying to do right by Gene (even though he turns out to have been a pretty crappy person), trying to do his best with what he has, a true underdog champion.

And yet all that philosophy is hidden inside a story full of locker-room trash talk, mediocre chain restaurants, and knockoff team jerseys. Joe might be a loser, but he’s nobody’s sad sack, and the book is alive with funny dialogue and slapstick humor. If your book club meets at Buffalo Wild Wings, Season Of Gene should be on your list.

[John Luiz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It captures all the typical guy obsessions -- baseball. professional athletes, and videogames (predominantly Madden NFL). The basic premise is that the manager of an amateur baseball team experiences the death of his friend/teammate in the midst of a game, and then he's left to clean up the mess his friend had made of his life. The biggest challenge is to track down the bat that Babe Ruth used in the 1932 World Series, during which he reportedly called a home run by pointing to the outfield where he planned to hit it. The dead friend had managed to get his hand on the bat, which is expected to be worth several million dollars, so the main character, Joe Rice, has to retrieve it to help the dead man's now heavily indebted wife, while contending with a Mob-tied family who'd like to keep it for themselves. There is a lot of humor here, wonderful characterizations, and very touching moments, but none too sentimental, in keeping with the macho attitude most of the characters try to cop. Joe has a very attentive relationship with his girlfriend's 12-year-old son, but their way of connecting is to trade profanity-laced trash talk while competing at the Madden game. There's a particularly poignant moment when Joe runs into one of the boy's teachers at his school. The teacher is concerned because the boy is doing poorly -- a situation Joe can sympathize with because he was never much of a student either. When the teacher asks him a few simple questions, Joe gets nervous and feels put on the spot, flashing back to the moments when he felt put on the spot by teachers everyday. In a funny Sopranos-like moment, Joe tries to use a big word to impress the teacher, but uses the word "progeny" when he means prodigy. It's a very funny demonstration of how men never really grow up, but it also has some very touching examinations of men's relationship with women. I highly recommend if you're looking for something well written but also immensely entertaining. Some of the funniest observations come when Joe draws parallels between managing a baseball game to handling people and challenging situations in his life. (A great video of the author reading from this book appears here: http://forum-network.org/lecture/dall...)