Inman Majors

What a fun book this is. I'm new to Majors work, but this one made me want to go and read all of his other novels. He offers a very funny satire of college football life. But the games don't take center stage here. What does is an out-of-season "cavalcade" in which the coaches go on tour to raise money and meet with the team's boosters and hard-core fans. The main protagonist is coach Raymond Love, an earnest graduate of a Division III school, who's now working as a post-graduate assistant at a big-time division one school under a flamboyant, self-absorbed coach. Love is hoping to get a full-time coaching job with the team, but his main competition for the job is another smooth-talking graduate assistant who is a master at sucking-up. During the calvalcade, Love is given one important task -- keeping the wild, hard-drinking and hard-living defensive coordinator out of trouble. There are lots of fun escapades as Love fails miserably at that assignment. The obsessed fans and boosters go under the satirists' knife as much as the coaching staff does. The novel offers a series of exceprts from fan chat rooms, and those sections are hysterically funny and a dead-on portrait of the silliness of the debates you see in comment sections on Web sites. Love also has a couple of love interests -- a cute smart-aleck peer in the sports management department, who seems to be out of bounds because she has a long-distance fiance and another, gorgeous woman whom Love eventually learns is the athletic director's daughter. She strings him along by asking him to become a member of her book club - a not very macho thing to do that none of his football peers can understand. In the club, she forces him to read books similar to Eat, Pray, Love, and Majors does another great job at poking fun of the absurdity of these books in which sex, food, travel and spirtuality all get mixed up. As a bonus, the back section of the book offers a reading guide that is a terrific send-up of these guides and the discussions people have at book club meetings. Strong characters and a humorous portrayal of a world that takes itself more seriously than it should make this a very entertaining read.… (mehr)