The Good Body
by Bill Gaston
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Description
"He is Bobby "Loose" Bonaduce: professional hockey player, old-fashioned charmer, incorrigible rogue. After an athletic career spent chasing - and never quite catching - stardom, Bobby is facing the end of a long love affair with his own arrested adolescence. With the chasm of retirement before him, he is compelled to reach out to the family he abandoned years before, fast-talking his way into the home of Leah, the wife he left behind, and into a graduate seminar at the school where his son, show more Jason, is an undergrad. With valiant, bullheaded grace, Bobby wrestles with the earnest idiocies of academia, tilting desperately at writing assignments that stubbornly elude him. Yet at the same time - unbeknownst to his family - he is also struggling with an insidious disease that threatens to rob him of the one thing that has never let him down: his body." "Bobby's attempts to navigate the no-man's-land of his failed marriage, to fashion a kind of rough bond with his son, and to learn to trust the truths of his heart in place of the waning force in his body - The Good Body blends all these strains together."--BOOK JACKET. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Minor-league hockey goon Bobby Bonaduce discovers he has MS and returns to Fredericton, hoping for one last chance to play hockey with the son he abandoned. His son plays for UNB; to get on the team, Bonaduce (now a more dignified "Robert") cheats his way into the creative writing MFA program. Complications ensue.
Bonaduce is a likable goofball surrounded by good, clearly drawn characters, and The Good Body is funny and engaging throughout. But the ending is unsatisfying.
This novel could easily slide into sentimentality, and one of its great strengths is that it does not. But, probably because Gaston refuses sentiment, the conclusion seems to leave everything unresolved.
Bonaduce is a likable goofball surrounded by good, clearly drawn characters, and The Good Body is funny and engaging throughout. But the ending is unsatisfying.
This novel could easily slide into sentimentality, and one of its great strengths is that it does not. But, probably because Gaston refuses sentiment, the conclusion seems to leave everything unresolved.
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Author Information
21+ Works 352 Members
Awards and Honors
Awards
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction, Suspense & Thriller
- DDC/MDS
- 813.54 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American fiction in English 1900-1999 1945-1999
- LCC
- PR9199.3 .G373 .G66 — Language and Literature English English Literature English literature: Provincial, local, etc.
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 41
- Popularity
- 714,224
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (2.80)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 7
