Don’t Know Tough
Eli Cranor
Soho Press ($24.95) – Available at Square Books
Order here
Billy Lowe, varsity running back for the Arkansas Denton Pirates, comes from a brutally punishing, poverty-crippled background. Abuse of all kinds are ever-present in his environment, and violence has been the rule of law. He is following his older brother, Ricky, former quarterback, presently drugged-out in a trailer, on the time-honored Lowe family path to destitution. Enter: Trent Powers, a failing coach from California who married into football royalty only to keep failing season after season. Taking the Denton Pirates to the championship is the last chance for Trent, and courting a college scholarship is the only chance for Billy. As things start to look up, a startling act of violence shakes up sleepy Denton, throwing Trent, Billy, and their families in its wake.
In the tradition of the greatest “sports” books of all time (think DeLillo’s End Zone, Lardner’s You Know Me Al, etc.), Don’t Know Tough is hardly about football, really. It’s about family, expectations, love, growing up, abuse, addiction, and small-town American society; football is merely the means through which author Eli Cranor talks about these issues. That isn’t to say a true football fanatic wouldn’t get a kick out of this book; if you have any in your family, this is the perfect novel to get them over the hump until September.
A thread throughout Don’t Know Tough is a reading and explication of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Billy reads the book to impress the coach’s daughter, Lorna, but it ends up saving him in several ways. I suspect that Hemingway’s novel, itself something of a sports classic, is name-dropped here as a kind-of aesthetic exemplar for Cranor, and he pulls it off. The action is lean and direct, the voices equally stripped-down and powerful, and the themes, as I listed above, are perennial ones, explored honestly. The set-up of the “mystery” actually takes a long time to become established; the focus is instead on characterization and voice. In this way, Cranor’s book reminded me of a recent novel by an Oxford local, Melissa Ginsburg’s The House Uptown. Both are intense character studies of a few close people, voice-driven, that erupt into violent revelations toward the end. Like Ava, the protagonist of Ginsburg’s novel, Billy Lowe emerges as an unforgettable character, relatable and unique at once.
Eli Cranor has written himself into very good company with this debut. I recommend anyone that enjoys wa good nail-biter or tear-jerker to buy Don’t Know Tough, and I invite you to join me in waiting impatiently for his next book.
