Review by New York Times Review
A FICTION TEACHER once told us that we should know every detail about the characters we create, down to the kind of bath towel they prefer, even if the towel never appears in the story That advice smacked of Stanislavsky's "method," wherein actors try to learn everything about a character's background - first kiss, favorite smell - before stepping onstage. I wondered, a bit enviously, if actors who tried their hand at writing fiction would invent characters with greater depth than we mere scribblers. I'm not sure about all actor-authors, but in "Bucky _ Dent," his second novel, the TV star David Duchovny so believably brings to life his slacker, potsmoking, 30-something protagonist, Ted Fullilove, that we feel for Ted the way we feel for most slacker, pot-smoking, 30-somethings: Get a life. The problem is that Ted thinks he has one. When we meet him he's selling peanuts at Yankee Stadium during the 1978 baseball season. He's a devoted follower of the Grateful Dead; he has a ponytail, a "soft belly" and "man breasts" (due, we're told, to hormonal imbalances caused by chronic pot smoking). He's also a highly literate Ivy League graduate who reads the modernists and wants only enough money to keep his "brokedown" Bronx apartment so he can write the Great American Novel (always a dubious aspiration). But in fact, Ted's already got several novels in progress, including the 536-page "Mr. Ne'er-Do-Well" and another that comes in at 1,171 pages and weighs over 12 pounds. So maybe "slacker" doesn't apply to his writing, but it applies to every other part of his life, especially relationships. He had one true love, now gone; his pet is a battery-operated goldfish; his mother is dead; he hasn't spoken to his father in half a decade. And his literary agent hates his novels. Ted's life is ready for a shake-up. But that will be slow to come. In a short early chapter, we follow Ted, after a game, into the changing room, where he takes off his work uniform (a cardboard box with shoulder straps made to look like a peanut bag) and dons his "life uniform" (tie-dye shirt, bluejeans and sandals). In terms of dramatic action, that's pretty much all that happens, but in terms of character background, Duchovny brings us so close to Ted we feel as though we might have caught a contact buzz. Much of the novel's first half moves at this pace and in this mode. (In another chapter, Ted walks from the locker room to his car in the parking lot - but, oh, what exposition fills those few pages!) The opening may well be Duchovny's sly nod to the books Ted reads: Virginia Woolf also privileged character development over plot development to give us Clarissa Dalloway's rich interiority. But when Ted gets a phone call from a grief counselor at Beth Israel hospital, telling him that his long-estranged father, Marty, is dying of lung cancer, both Ted and the novel pick up the pace. From there, Duchovny finds his rhythm, balancing crisp dialogue with some truly hilarious scenes that draw on the small cast of colorful secondary characters. The real drama is between Ted and Marty. After a hospital-room reunion, where Ted is shocked to see how "skinny and gray" his father is, Ted moves back to his childhood home in Park Slope to care for the cantankerous widower whom Ted, for complicated reasons, still hotly resents. Secrets are revealed, love interests appear, diaries are discovered, joints are passed between father and son, and life's big issues - love, sex, marriage, parenting, death, baseball - are examined. It all has the potential for some sappy feel-good melodrama just in time for Father's Day; but somehow, like Bucky Dent himself, Duchovny hits an unexpected home run. Marty, you see, is a Red Sox fan in the year of a legendary Red Sox collapse. As his health declines with every game the team loses that season, Ted's creativity finds its true expression, and he gets a life by trying to bring meaning to another. JOSEPH SALVATORE, the books editor for The Brooklyn Rail, is the author of the story collection "To Assume a Pleasing Shape." He teaches at the New School.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 5, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Struggling as a novelist, making ends meet working as a peanut vendor at Yankee Stadium, Ted Fillilove is nearing the all-star break in the season of his life. Then he learns that his father, Marty, is dying of lung cancer, and at the urging of an especially attractive nurse, he moves back into the family home in Brooklyn. Father and son have been at odds for years; they don't even root for the same baseball team. When Ted notices that Marty rallies whenever his beloved Red Sox win, he enlists Marty's friends, old guys who hang around the magazine kiosk on the corner, to help him stage elaborate deceptions involving doctored newspapers, a VCR, and even simulated rainouts to make it look like the team is on a winning streak. The father-son reconciliation culminates in a road trip to Boston to attend the 1978 Yankee versus Red Sox playoff game. Duchovny's lively novel, replete with references to literature and popular music as well as baseball, treats its themes with wit and warmth.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Is it fair to call a Columbia University graduate who sells peanuts at Yankee Stadium an underachiever? It's 1978, and weed-toking, Grateful Dead-quoting, overweight, bearded would-be novelist Ted Fullilove (aka Mr. Peanut) is more than surprised to get a call that his father, Marty, is in the hospital, as Ted hasn't spoken to his old man for five years. A former advertising salesman who spouts poetry, literary references, and racial epithets with equal facility, Marty is a die-hard Boston Red Sox fan. He is also dying of lung cancer, but he believes he won't shut that door until after the World Series and the long-suffering Sox have won. Ted becomes complicit in that effort as a way to regain a relationship with Marty that, in truth, never really existed. Along for the ride are Marty's neighborhood cronies the gray panthers and a Hispanic grief counselor named Mariana. Verdict Actor/screenwriter/director Duchovny (Holy Cow) has recruited a pair of sort of likable guys to lead us on this father-son odyssey, with the requisite foul language and fouler air as the Fullilove men discover a level playing field. Baseball fans will be thoroughly absorbed by the Sox vs. Bums play-by-play. Recommended for all fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert 10/12/15.]-Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A frustrated young writer discovers a surprising redemption when he moves back in with his dying father. Duchovny (Holy Cow, 2015) follows up his whimsical debut with a far more substantive coming-of-age novel that started life over a decade ago as an unproduced screenplay centered on the infamous 1978 American League East tiebreaker between the Yankees and the Red Sox. Our introduction to this well-captured corner of Americana comes from Ted Fullilove, an Ivy League graduate who largely wastes his potential by smoking pot, tossing peanuts at Yankee Stadium, and puttering around with the Great American Novel. When Ted learns that his long-estranged father, Marty, is dying, he moves back in with the cantankerous old man. Marty is a throwback to another age, a former adman with a secretive past revealed when he asks his son to read the journals he wrote as a younger man. As Ted spends more time with his father, he develops a grudging respect for the profane Marty, whose belligerence belies a whip-smart mind and a deep love for the son he calls "Splinter." Ted even gets surprised by his own romanticism when he falls for Mariana, a caretaker who warns Ted, "Death is not a story; it can't be faked out. Death is real. You can't really keep your father safe." There's a comic angle here, too. Marty's health plummets whenever the Red Sox lose, so Ted mounts an ambitious campaign to fake a winning season with the help of Mariana and Marty's elderly buddies. A truly funny moment comes later when Ted introduces Marty to the merits of marijuana. Readers who enjoy the story told here would be well-served by seeking out Duchovny's 2004 directorial debut, House of D, which shares many of the same assets. Duchovny riffs heavily on familiar themes here but still deftly portrays bittersweet nostalgia without lapsing into saccharine theatricality. A sentimental, staccato love letter to baseball, fatherhood, and the passage of time. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
