The Throwback Special

by Chris Bachelder

Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction

A slyly profound and startlingly original novel about the psyche of the American male, The Throwback Special marks the return of one of the most acclaimed literary voices of his generation.

Here is the absorbing story of twenty-two men who gather every fall to painstakingly reenact what ESPN called “the most shocking play in NFL history” and the Washington Redskins dubbed the “Throwback Special”: the November 1985 play in which the Redskins’ Joe Theismann had his leg horribly broken by Lawrence Taylor of the New York Giants live on Monday Night Football.

With wit and great empathy, Chris Bachelder introduces us to Charles, a psychologist whose expertise is in high demand; George, a garrulous public librarian; Fat Michael, envied and despised by the others for being exquisitely fit; Jeff, a recently divorced man who has become a theorist of marriage; and many more. Over the course of a weekend, the men reveal their secret hopes, fears, and passions as they choose roles, spend a long night of the soul preparing for the play, and finally enact their bizarre ritual for what may be the last time. Along the way, mishaps, misunderstandings, and grievances pile up, and the comforting traditions holding the group together threaten to give way.

The Throwback Special is a moving and comic tale filled with pitch-perfect observations about manhood, marriage, middle age, and the rituals we all enact as part of being alive.

Genres: Fiction, Sports, Literary Fiction, Novels, Book Club, Humor, Literature

213 pages, Hardcover

First published November 9, 2016

About the author

Chris Bachelder is the author of Bear V. Shark, U.S.!: Songs and Stories, Abbott Awaits, and The Throwback Special. His fiction and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, The Believer, and the Paris Review. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Cincinnati, where he teaches at the University of Cincinnati.

Reviews

[Book Clubbed · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book about the rituals of middle-aged men, the fragile psyches we all lug around, and how subsuming those psyches in a likeminded group is about as close we can get to peace.

With all the men and their banal names, it's hard to keep their personalities straight. Some people may not mind this--in fact, the protagonist of this book is effectively the author and his musings that he launders through various perspectives--but I'm a character-based reader, so this frustrated me. Even as a straight white guy, the white-ness and guy-ness of this novel became a little suffocating, which isn't a good sign.

He uses some structural tricks to keep us moving through the perspectives, such as the draft to pick players or the haircut confessionals, but the micro-writing structure I found to be lacking. Often he zigzags between snappy dialogue followed by long diatribes or reflections in page-long paragraphs. However, this elevated language would sometimes spill into the dialogue too, making it completely unbelievable. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out the purpose. My best guess is that he was juxtaposing seemingly innocuous subjects, like football, with high-brow language and philosophizing. A cute trick, I suppose, but one that draws me out of the already thin narrative.

The writing was fine, I suppose, although it often confused quantity with insight, ironic for such a slight novel. Repeating a single sentiment in differently worded statements or through various similes doesn't make it more convincing.

[Jessica Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is really something special. Truly one of the most amusing, entertaining and enjoyable books I’ve recently read. Don’t be discouraged by the plot description—there’s so much more to it than football, though the subject matter provides a fitting gateway into middle-aged manhood.

Every November, a group of 22 men gather at a 2-star suburban hotel to reenact “the most shocking play in NFL history,” a 1985 play dubbed the Throwback Special during which Redskins’ Joe Theismann suffered a career-ending leg injury. The book chronicles the men’s latest weekend retreat.

With 22 characters, no one is distinct. You won’t be able to remember what distinguishes Robert from Jeff or Carl from Trent or George from Andy. But that’s okay, and it’s sort of the point. This isn’t a book about individual characters, this is about the modern male psyche—together they make up a collective male conscious bumbling through the mundanity and terror of middle age.

Amusingly, every interaction has the weight of an existential crisis, from Peter meticulously boiling a mouthguard to Nate confessing that he has a bizarre sexual obsession with the illustrated women in children’s books. When the time comes for the men to gather and pick their players, it’s more than just a simple choice, it’s a reflection of their inner selves. Bachelder presents this all with stunning psychological and philosophical insight that never feels overwrought.

It’s unclear how the men know each other or how the tradition began, but they are united in their dependence on it. They take comfort in the routine, in the certainty of the predetermined outcome—an anchor to some semblance of serenity and stability amid their ever-changing lives.

Bachelder, brilliantly, reveals to us the absurdity of his characters while treating them with genuine love, dignity and empathy. It’s the laugh-out-loud kind of humor and commentary designed to comfort those of us who are intimately familiar with pervasive melancholy, existential anxiety and consuming self-consciousness. It’s hilarious and heartbreaking all at once. I laughed with these 22 men throughout the duration of their beloved weekend, not at them.

[Larry H · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm between 3.75 and 4 stars, so I'll round up...

Full disclosure: I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review. Many thanks to NetGalley and W.W. Norton & Company for making it available!

One weekend every November, a group of 22 guys get together at a hotel. They aren't friends during the year, but there is rarely a question that they'll miss this weekend.

The purpose? They gather to reenact (although they hate that word, since for them it connotes people dressed in war uniforms holding guns) what is known in football history as "the most shocking play in NFL history": on November 18, 1985, Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann had his leg horribly broken on live television by New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor. The injury ended Theismann's career, and was replayed several times that night on television, although commentator Frank Gifford warned those "with strong stomachs."

The weekend isn't just a casual game of touch football. Every year one of the men becomes the commissioner, and each man gets to choose which player (of those Redskins and Giants players who were on the field for that play) they will play that year. They watch the film of that play, room together by position, and even dress in authentic uniforms, down to wristbands or taped body parts. Some of the men take the weekend and their roles very seriously, while others would rather be anywhere else but know they're obligated.

If your eyes have already glazed over because you're not a football fan, rest assured that Chris Bachelder's The Throwback Special is less about football and more about life. The men have been playing for a number of years now, and most are approaching or are solidly entrenched in middle age, experiencing all of the stresses and problems which come with it, from physical ailments, difficulties and/or concerns with their children, financial challenges, marital woes, etc. These are men who bear the weight of life on their shoulders, and while this weekend should serve as a release for them, they can't seem to shake everything that's going on in their "real lives."

This is a really interesting and sensitive meditation on the burden of manhood and growing older, as well as the dissatisfaction and the disappointment that comes with it. Bachelder has a great ear for dialogue, which imbues this book with a great deal of sensitivity and humor. The challenge is, there are so many characters that it's hard to keep all of them straight—there's Fat Michael (who isn't fat in the least) and Bald Michael (who is bald), Adam and Andy, and many others—and while some of the characters are more vivid, it takes a little time to remember which one you're reading about.

I'm a huge football fan and we even have Redskins season tickets, so this book definitely appealed to me, but you don't need to know the first thing about football to enjoy The Throwback Special . If you're a guy dealing with growing older and the challenges of life, or you know someone like that, this book may interest you. It's very different than I expected it to be, but it definitely captivated me.

See all of my reviews at http://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blo....

[Brandice · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not sure if I thought the writing in The Throwback Special was brilliant or irksome. I guess I altered between these two feelings as I read the book. I liked the way it was written - the sentence structure felt unusual compared to many modern books, and it seemed to work well here, yet I also felt it was too much at some points.

There are many men in The Throwback Special, a story about a group of men who get together one weekend every year to reenact the play that ended Joe Theismann’s football career, when the Giants played the Redskins in 1985. Spoiler alert: Redskins won, 23-21. Confession: I did not know the details of this game, the play, or Theismann’s injury, prior to reading this book. While I am a sports fan, this was a bit before my time.

The group of men have a set of rules for picking which character they are each year as well as other traditions for the weekend, including staying at a dingy, non-descript, 2-star hotel. The book had somewhat of a depressing vibe as many of the men generally seem unhappy with their lives outside of this particular weekend. It was a bit hard to keep track of who was who, but it also didn’t really seem to matter. The men recall memories from previous years through the story too, so the reader gets a feel for the group as a whole.

I felt like The Throwback Special was a unique story, although the time devoted to the actual reenactment seemed minimal. I guess that aspect is realistic for some events in real life though - a big buildup for a quick action or event. The book was pretty short and while I didn’t love it, I did enjoy it.

[Darby · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not about football. This book is not about men. It happens to be set over a weekend when some men gather, as they have each year for many years, to enact an event that took place in a football game decades ago. And it's not really even a book about the kind of men who would do that or the event itself. It's about rituals we don't even realize we partake in; it's about wanting to fit in and wanting to be unique; it's about predictability and the inevitability of change. It's a book you can see yourself in. It will make you laugh out loud, and it will make you feel pangs of pity, revulsion, recognition, and kinship. Here's a tip though--there are a LOT of characters, but you don't need to keep them straight. They are all parts of the same familiar persons, those we know and those we are.

[lark benobi]

I didn’t care for the experience of reading this novel but I’m glad I read it. It feels like a time-capsule examination of the preoccupations of American manhood in the immediate pre-Trump years and wow how things have changed. It was a unique read in that it’s not quite a third-person-plural read--the 22 men coming together for an annual ritual never once become a unified point of view--never once resembles the “we-ness” of The Virgin Suicides, for example--but on the other hand the men for the most part aren’t each given enough of a story arc to register as differentiated people. That’s part of the message, maybe--that these middle-aged men are all at the same stage of life and are experiencing life’s disappointments in a way that has slight variations from one man to the next but for the most part are the normal "wrackfull siege of batt’ring days."

it doesn’t seem to be Bachelder’s purpose to differentiate these men as individuals. They get names, they get little “tags” so we readers can remember who the only Black man is in the group, and who is the fittest among the men(both critical differentiations, it turns out, to the story’s message), but for the most part I don’t think I’m supposed to think of these men as uniquely important and deserving of attention. The message seems more to be: we are all on the same road; dust to dust.

It’s nervy for how little it delivers. Even the event the entire book is building up to deflates like a poked mylar balloon. It reminded me slightly of Less by Andrew Sean Greer.

[Trudie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, this ended up feeling like a reading purgatory of my own making.

It's not that I particularly dislike sports books - I really enjoyed Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game but generally sports and the woes of middle aged men don't inspire me to pick up a book about them. However, as it so happened I needed a "sports book" for a reading challenge and The Throwback Special had also made it onto the Tournament of Books shortlist for this year.

This book started out as fun, like being a fly on the wall of a crazy weekend where 22 men gather to reenact a disastrous football play. A "play" I came to understand being a series of moves (such as the title "Throwback Special") not a football inspired theatrical performance. Although, in a way it was that too, each man playing his part and taking turns each year at playing Joe Theismann the player that ends up under a pile of linebackers with a career ending compound fracture.
I have no doubt it would be possible to get more from this novel if you understood that moment in football history. I still can't get to grips with why an entire novel is based around it.

This book is essentially a series of vignettes of these assorted men (none of whom you get to know well) their banal, funny, odd and oddly philosophical internal monologues. They seem to float randomly about this twilight zone-esque motel, adhering to time-honoured pre-game rituals.

One of my main questions with this novel was - how do all these men know each other ? why do they only see each other once a year and for this ? I couldn't even figure out if they particularly liked each other - they seemed completely on their own journeys.
My three-star rating reflects my feeling there is good writing here, clever observations of men, particularly the intricacies of what is said and not said. Certainly, I laughed out loud several times. But then things go on a little long - there is, for example, this ...

They heard Frank Gifford say that it was unseasonably warm. They read the caption “Live from Washington, D.C.,” and saw that the periods were squares. The font, quaint and earnest, elicited a warm and formless memory of safety. The warm and formless memory of safety elicited by the quaint earnestness of the font made them feel mournful. The mournfulness caused by the formless memory of safety elicited by the quaint font made them feel like brimming vessels.

Yes, he is talking about fonts ( for fonts sake !) ...

In summary this book is ok (?) but I would have preferred more sport and less navel gazing.

[Leo Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chris Bachelder pulls a “full Hemingway” in The Throwback Special, a 2016 National Book Awards finalist, which puts him in a rare class of writers. And like the National Book Award winner The Underground Railroad, Throwback lives up to the hype.

First off, what does “full Hemingway” mean? Most writers aping Hemingway copy his terse style, which is great but easy to pull off. Others pull off the machismo, again easy. But most miss what made Hemingway great: his understanding that the machismo often empty bluster and Hemingway's mythic scope which is masked under a veneer of realism. For instance, Jake Barnes from The Sun Also Rises has a thigh wound, rendering him infertile, like the Fisher King in the Arthurian legends. That is no accident.

Bachelder is a rare writer, able to spin a realistic yarn that reads mythic. Special's premise sounds dull. Twenty-two middle-aged men gather once a year at a cheap hotel to reenact the 1985 play that ended Joe Theismann’s career, with the Giant's Lawrence Taylor shattering his leg on Monday Night Football. When I read the blurb, I shrugged. It reminded me of a local group here in NE Ohio that reenacts D-Day on Lake Erie. Which has always struck me as silly, middle age men playing army. Child’s play, but with better props than the toy guns and cardboard box “tanks” we used when kids.

Luckily, Throwback exceeded expectations.

It feels mythical. There are times when I felt like I was reading about a ritual in ancient Greece, where Achilles’s death were being reenacted. Another work that came to mind was Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, where mid 20th century rural New England villagers enact an horrific ritual, at once aware of its significance while remaining willfully ignorant, allowing the mundane duties of setting up the ritual to absorb their attention.

Part of what makes Throwback seem mythic is Bachelder’s omniscient narrator. The godlike narrator flits from head to head: participants, hotel employee, and other hotel occupants. In a flash of genius, the roving eye even narrates a scene from in front of the hotel’s sixteen-screen security office. Incredible technique, though at first the “head hopping” threw me off and made getting into the book difficult.

The well-envisioned characters Bachelder hops into, though, yanked me in. And once hooked, the tale captivated me.

As these familiar yet singular men run through the often absurd preparations for a silly reenactment, you learn about their lives. They’re a typical lot, beset with middle-age, middle-class concerns: kids, divorce, unfulfilling careers, the nagging backs and creaking joints that come with age, etc. Some of these confessions are a riot, and yet sad, like a man confessing that he's attracted to the decidedly un-sexy illustrated women in the books he reads his young children.

But how they react to the myriad insignificant tasks the reenactment requires reveals more about them as characters than their petty concerns. For instance, the planners in the group—the ones the narrator informs us have “well-fortified 501 K’s”—pick the positions they’ll play this year during the selection lottery strategically, optimizing their chances of being (or not being) Joe Theismann or Lawrence Taylor next year. Other’s just want to be a person whose style they like.

Bachelder also does a wonderful job drawing the inner thoughts of individual characters. His strongest character is Derek, who “was of mixed race, which is to say he was black.” As the only African American, he becomes a peculiar focus of the book’s characters, despite that fact that save his race, he’s a decent if unremarkable guy like them. And yet, from the time he enters, hood popped as he works on his car, Derek’s the center of attention. In the parking lot, the aging white men gather about Derek's broken car as if he were an “irresistible synergistic force, the dream of multiculturalism fused with the dream of automotive expertise.” His centrality continues in the hotel lobby, where the other men float about Derek. Electrons to his proton, using the metaphor Bachelder uses through the extended scene.

Unlike the other men, who being white take things for granted, Derek is aware his race of necessity. For instance, it is customary for the person selected first in the lottery to choose being Taylor, who caused Theismann’s career-ending injury. Theismann was white, Taylor African-American, so Derek sweats being first, unwilling to take the role, which would reinforce the societal stereotype “dangerous black male.” It's at once comic, preposterous and real.

As the story proceeds, we see that Derek is not over-reacting to his identification with the role he plays. All the men do it. The offensive linemen, who fail in their jobs to protect Theismann, are shamed by their ineptness. The defensive backfield, peripheral to the play, bunk together on the eve of the reenactment in a room dubbed “Las Vegas,” implying it’s a party room when in reality, since they’re bit players, the room is glum. And after the reenactment over, the others watch the man who played Theismann, the ironically named fitness buff “Fat Mike,” for several hours because he seems depressed. We learn that Mike’s identification with Theismann, who described the play and his injury recovery as death and rebirth, is so complete that playing Theismann as his career ended forced Mike to face his own mortality.

All things considered, The Throwback Special is one of the best books I’ve read this year. Despite its short length, it took a while to read, since the point-of-view shifts are rapid, and I often flipped back pages, thinking “who’s Charles (or Robert or George, etc.) again?” But once oriented, the book compelling, humane and often hilarious. And the characters regular guys, who could be anyone’s next-door neighbor, and the reenactment, rife with overly-complex ritual (I laughed at the complex rules associated with the lotter drawing) both preposterous and yet psychologically necessary to these aging friends.

Five stars.

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

When this book landed on the National Book Award shortlist I had never heard of it. But I grew up in the DC area, I remember 1985 and I remember seeing the footage of Theismann's injury over and over.

In this novel Bachelder tells the story of 22 men who have gathered every year for the last 16 years to reenact "the most shocking play in NFL history" If you aren't familiar with what happened after a flea flicker gone wrong Theismann stepped into the pocket and was crushed by Lawrence Taylor of the NY Giants. His leg was horribly broken and he never threw another pass in the NFL.

I am not an American football fan, nor do I find straight, (mostly) white, forty-something American men all that interesting so this was not a book that was in my wheelhouse so to speak.

I didn't hate it. It was just very meh to me.

[Brian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read (or rather endured) in serialized form in Paris Review. The book covers a weekend getaway in which a group of whiny, insecure and neutered men gather to reenact a specific football play from the mid 80s. I lost count of the times the dialogue lost all touch with any semblance of authenticity - like Rachel Cusk's serialized novel last year in the PR this felt like some prized submission from an Iowa writer's workshop that garners plaudits for its style over its substance. Unfortunately it lacks both. (Hopefully PR will find another lost Bolano novel to serialize.)

Here is but one of many examples, context is one of the men is cutting hair for the others:

"The custom arose spontaneously, and it was perpetuated without consideration. A haircut by an an acquaintance required submission, and submission required privacy. The man sat, he wore a musty cape, heavy as a welcome mat. Carl sprayed his hair with a water bottle and combed it, humiliatingly, straight forward. There was no mirror. Drops of water ran down the man's nose. His face itched, but he did not scratch it. His arms were trapped beneath the heavy cape. He was a child again, a boy. His thoughts drifted towards his mother."

They. Are. Just. Getting. A. Haircut.

[Ammy]

One of the very few books I couldn't finish. I read 100+ pages. The reviews said you didn't have to like football to enjoy it. They neglected to say you have to like 20+ whiny and unhappy guys to enjoy it.

[JimZ · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. This is the second book I have read by this author…the first one was Abbott Awaits…and that book consisted of 1-3 page chapters with titles….I found the short chapters to be a plus for that book, and it had its moments but to me it was “just OK” overall. This book I was even less enthused about, although again it had its moments. But with some books I get lost in them...like I really believe what is happening as I read. That to me is what makes a good work of fiction. To be totally immersed. But with some books I never get immersed – the writer is just too pretentious…and with some other books I get immersed at times but then realize jarringly I am reading something that is not real… And that’s what I felt with this book/this writer. But maybe it’s just me… He got good reviews (blurbs) by good authors including Michael Chabon and George Saunders.

And as I say the book did have its moments. A character or characters would every now and then be thinking/ruminating/doing something …and I could really identify with what was going on. For example, one of the characters was going through a divorce. And so one night he and his wife called their 13 year old daughter and 9 year old son into the living room and told them they were getting a divorce. One hour later the father is looking for the 9 year old son all throughout the house and cannot find him. He gets frantic. The last place he looks is his daughter’s room – this is because “his son and daughter didn’t even like each other. All they did was fight. The boy was not allowed in this room.” And yet: “The girl was in bed, texting. Andy’s son was curled up beside her asleep. Andy’s daughter did not look up from the phone. Andy nodded to her, and he left the room.” I could imagine the boy was traumatized when he heard his parents tell him and his sister they were breaking up. He went to his sister…who else could he turn to? And she let him into her room, her sanctuary… I was touched. I could see that happening. The author had me.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely the kind of book where style is more prominent than substance. But, the style is thoroughly enjoyable, relatable, honest, and funny in its examination of middle-aged men and sublime traditions.

The humor is Seinfeld-esque, for lack of a better descriptor.

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

I literally could not stop laughing as I read this. Bachelder's brand of humor is pitch perfect, and this was just great for Thanksgiving weekend. I could not resist constantly reading passages out loud to whoever was around me...The Throwback Special almost certainly contains the highest ratio of snorts/giggles/grins/outright laughter per page packed inside any book I think I have ever read. A treasured new entry into my "favorites" and a book I will be pushing onto loved ones for a long time.

[Tara · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a book about men and about deficiency. I found it to be bleak, frustrating, and overwhelmingly cynical. We get inside the heads of 20+ middle aged men, and we find them to be fearful, disappointed, stunted, vulnerable, confused, ashamed, and/or threatened. Everyone is worse than they seem.

I added this book to my "To Read" pile after I read this quote in the Minneapolis paper: "Chris Bachelder’s “The Throwback Special” is 2016’s first Great Book, and, despite being about football and being set in a dingy hotel, it is almost transcendentally tender." I disagree wholeheartedly. This book was an exercise in self pity and navel-gazing for aging white men.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This just made the 2016 National Book Award nominations list and I'm really pleased. I read it in June and completely enjoyed this short novel about a group of American men who get together every year for a weekend at a hotel to recreate a football play. - It didn't matter that I don't like football - it's all about the characters. Funny and sad and very witty.

[Tyler Goodson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love awards and lists because they compel me to read books I wouldn't have normally picked up. I had previously passed over this novel, which is ostensibly about a group of men who meet once a year to reenact a football play from 1985, but really about everything that makes them human. Absolutely surprising and completely wonderful.

[Caroline · Rating 2 out of 5]

What at all was even the point of this book.

[Joachim Stoop · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad at all! Sometimes very funny and true to life -altough sometimes a bit too American/Hollywood. The 5-star pieces and passages were just too few.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I avoided this book for a few reasons namely that the cover looked exactly like The Art of Fielding and I thought it would be a poor imitation of that excellent book and I'm an Australian with zero interest in or knowledge of American football (the exception being Friday Night Lights which, of course, is not about football at all). But when it was longlisted for the National Book Award I thought I'd give it a try. So glad I did or I would have missed out on this tender and joyful delight. This is not a book about football or about reenactment. It's about ritual and tradition. These 22 men meet each year to reenact a NFL play that leaves the quarterback with a badly broken leg. They take this reenactment seriously and Bachelder clearly loves each of these men and so did I. The scene where three of the men meet at the usual spot where they smoke, each too embarrassed to tell the others he's actually quit smoking was tender and perfect. As was the moment after breakfast where they stayed in each other's company oblivious to the fact that they were having the time of their lives. Bachelder is a witty observer and I clearly need to go and read everything he's ever written. Also, the tailback is named Riggins!
'It could be said of Steven, as it could be said of each man, that he was the plant manager of a sophisticated psychological refinery, capable of converting vast quantities of crude ridicule into tiny, glittering nuggets of sentiment. And vice versa, as necessary.'

[Drew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'll give Bachelder credit: he's an interesting writer. There are moments, virtual flashes, of gripping brilliance to this novel: a man washing a stain out of shirt in the middle of the night in a hotel fountain; the rotating image of the hotel's sixteen security cameras; the reenactment seen through the eyes not of the men but of the young tech employees also staying at the hotel. But the point of this novel is one I just can't get behind. I don't need to read stories of declining ordinary middle-aged men, not anymore. Give me a new twist on the tale, tell me a story we don't hear so often, give me something that looks to the future instead of yet another novel that, at its core, longs for a time when men were men and America stood tall on top of the world. This book tries to undercut that message but it fails - because at its core, it cannot escape wanting the same thing: a time when books like this mattered, instead of being a relic even as it debuts.

More bemoaning the slow death of the patriarchy at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2017/02...

[Jody · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rave reviews from Michael Chabon, Lauren Groff, George Saunders? What were they smoking?!?!?
This book unnerved me in that a) I wasn't blown away by the story nor b) was I blown away by Bachelder's writing. The exact opposite really - Bachelder couldn't seem to fixate on anything long enough for you to care. None of the (2o some odd) characters felt fleshed out and very few of the details felt at all necessary, i.e. A full paragraph six sentences and at least a third of a page telling what room numbers in a hotel 20 different people are staying in. I'm aggravated by this slim book in the same (odd connection) way that I was to Will Allison's What We Have Left: Where did this seemingly interesting concept, by a somewhat well-respected author go so wrong?

[Daniel Sevitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Funny book that reminds me how hard it is to do funny and how unlikely I probably am to enjoy a funny book without reservation even if it were unreservedly successful. This was on my radar since it was shortlisted in the Tournament of Books last year. It's the right length and it's refreshingly specific. The meandering POV reminded me of the first person plural narrator of Then We Came to the End and it still worked for me, mostly.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without a doubt the best book I've read this year. Funny and insightful, Bachelder accurately captures men of a certain age. These are men I know, the ones I admire and those I don't want to be. He gets the simple anxieties of how we present to each other, and how we present to ourselves. Well worth reading.

[Katie Conover · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I could not put it down.

Twenty-two men overtaken by the somewhat meaningless of their daily lives find deep importance and understanding in their (somewhat silly) yearly reenactment of the 5 second 1985 football play where Jon Theismann gets his leg broken in two places.

Most of the men won’t admit to their love for each other and this commitment, seeing it as almost an obligation. But their personal introspections are riddled with fondness for this event.

This felt like unpeeling an orange that has started its opening itself, desperate to be free and seen.

Each character was so true and flawed and familiar.

Great ending, too.

[John Luiz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chris Bachelder has an amazing amount of talent, and other reviewers seemed to have a better understanding of what he was trying to do here, but for me the book proved to be a chore to read for several reasons.

1. There's a huge cast a characters, but they're difficult to tell apart -- only a few have traits - like "Fat Michael" who was really quite muscular, so his nickname was ironic -- that make them distinguishable in your head as you read along
2. A lot of the backstories that each character dwells on just aren't that compelling. My sympathy and empathy for them was never evoked. There is the distance from character that satire normally presents, but their stories and outlines just feel like caricatures that seem to poke fun and diminish them in a way, but not even in a great bitingly satirical way.
3. It's never made clear why this once incident -- the play in which Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann has his leg broken -- is so important to him that they would come together every year to relive it.
4. There's not enough back story about the real players involved -- only a few, but nothing that raises the stakes and provides intriguing information about the real characters involved that helps to heighten why this incident was so important. The one minor exception to that is a rumination about by a black character who thinks about the implications of Lawrence Taylor being the player who fell on Theismann and injured him, and how that may have heightened all the negative stereotypes of black men in America. That passage was interesting and the book could have used more of it. (The kind of stuff that every behind the scenes book about a championship provides that makes the athletes involved in the events we saw unfold seem so much more interesting).

There is interesting stuff about how fetishtic this ritual becomes for the men -- with important details like the drum they use to roll the pinballs (like a lottery ball machine) -- so that each man can pick the player they want to be.

But overall I kept thinking about other novels that did this better -- like Joshua Ferris And Then We Came to the End that captured the groupthink of people who work for an ad agency in an incredibly funny way. There are scenes in Tom Perrottta's Little Children in which he describes the football games the leader character engages in with a policemen's amateur athletic league that portray men's involvement in amateur sports in very funny ways. Robert Cohen's The Here and Now has an incredibly funny chapter about the lead character's participation in a Sunday afternoon central park softball game, and the great Dallas Hudgens' Season of Gene offers a great portrait of men's involvement in an amateur baseball league.

Kudos to the other readers who fully got what Bachelder was doing here, but I just didn't enjoy this one very much.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full disclosure: This book isn't really about football. It's deeper than that, and The Throwback Special, the infamous play the protagonists meet to reenact each year, is merely the blank canvas on which the author paints a fascinating character study about a very diverse group of men brought together by a single common interest. Bachelder's writing, from the clever word play to the understated humor to the poignant psychological observations about the group's private thoughts as individuals and their behavior and "roles" as part of a group, is outstanding.

A few caveats: First, despite the fact that the book is not, at its heart, truly about football, it does require a pretty deep understanding of the game and a strong institutional memory of the NFL. If your knowledge of professional football is vague or nonexistent, this is not the book for you.

Second, this is also not the book for you if you don't like writing for writing's sake. There are some who would call this book "overwritten," because the author spends so much time riffing on things that don't really directly relate to the plot. But aside from just being exceptionally well-written, these elements do have a point, and while I'd be the first to say that riffing just to riff in a novel is a dangerous move for an author, Bachelder has the chops to pull it off.

An excellent, excellent read.

[Vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always appreciate books that make me empathize with self-pitying middle-aged men (see also, George Saunders, Tenth of December). And I did! This is the story of a big group of men who come together every year to reenact a single devastating play from an NFL game that happened years (decades?) ago. They go through their weird rituals while trying (and often failing) to connect, and grapple with loneliness, aging, parenting, money, and cuts to library funding. The book does this interesting thing where it sort of mashes the characters together and, with a few exceptions, doesn't give them terribly distinctive personalities or voices. That sounds like a mess, but it works surprisingly well. This is a strange, touching little book.

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Default 3.

I never cared. I just couldn't keep the 20-odd middle aged (all but one white) guys straight. I get that this particular moment in football history matters a lot to people, and that ritual matters a lot to people? men? But despite some good moments, two football teams worth of characters is more than even a more skilled novelist could breathe life into in such a short book, and I think Bachelder went back and forth on whether he was even trying.

[Jasey Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Newly-minted bachelderhead here. By eerie coincidence, Chris bachelder is from the same small town in Virginia that I’m from AND he attended the same grad program in Florida that I’m currently in. This is my first time reading one of his novels, and it feels like it was written for me. So insanely funny and also very sad. I love the structure of the novel-by-digression. One of my new favorites.