The following is from "Growing Pains & Joys" from The New York Times:
"It is about a young man coming of age, feeling teh joy and loss of first love, leaving his drab Middle Western home and going out into the world to become a writer. One can almost hear the ho-hums of certain sophisticated commentators to respond to such subject matter by asking, "So what else is new?"
The answer is, Mr. Tesich's novel is new. It is as new as its theme is old, as fresh as its plot is familiar. Working within conventional bonds, the author gives us a deeply moving story with a cast of unexpectedly intriguing characters.
The hero is Daniel Boone Price, a high school wrestler. As the story opens, he is grappling with his own conflicting empotions as well as with the state champ, an insidious hulk with a downstate Hoosier drawl whose "small, round head sat on top of that prehistoric neck like a Crenshaw melon on top of a fire hydrant." In a match that is one of the most psychologically revealing sporting events of recent fictionm Daniel watches his opponent keep smiling as his own comfortable lead dwindles to that unthinkable but inevitable moment when "I eased back into defeat as it into my proper place.
Daniel is the only chld of working, warring parents: "When they talked, they tried to inflict pain. When they were silent, they seemed to be devising new weapons." The famiy lives in East Chicago, Ind., an area known as "da region," a fatory town whose typical atmosphere is described on a day when "The air was getting isty and smoggy and the traffic lights on Indianapolis Boulevard glinted in the distance like harbor lights. You could smell the steel milss and the refineries. The odor prickled the inside of my nose and made me feel I was going to sneeze. On certain days you could watch the soot fall like black snow." . . . "
"It is about a young man coming of age, feeling teh joy and loss of first love, leaving his drab Middle Western home and going out into the world to become a writer. One can almost hear the ho-hums of certain sophisticated commentators to respond to such subject matter by asking, "So what else is new?"
The answer is, Mr. Tesich's novel is new. It is as new as its theme is old, as fresh as its plot is familiar. Working within conventional bonds, the author gives us a deeply moving story with a cast of unexpectedly intriguing characters.
The hero is Daniel Boone Price, a high school wrestler. As the story opens, he is grappling with his own conflicting empotions as well as with the state champ, an insidious hulk with a downstate Hoosier drawl whose "small, round head sat on top of that prehistoric neck like a Crenshaw melon on top of a fire hydrant." In a match that is one of the most psychologically revealing sporting events of recent fictionm Daniel watches his opponent keep smiling as his own comfortable lead dwindles to that unthinkable but inevitable moment when "I eased back into defeat as it into my proper place.
Daniel is the only chld of working, warring parents: "When they talked, they tried to inflict pain. When they were silent, they seemed to be devising new weapons." The famiy lives in East Chicago, Ind., an area known as "da region," a fatory town whose typical atmosphere is described on a day when "The air was getting isty and smoggy and the traffic lights on Indianapolis Boulevard glinted in the distance like harbor lights. You could smell the steel milss and the refineries. The odor prickled the inside of my nose and made me feel I was going to sneeze. On certain days you could watch the soot fall like black snow." . . . "
