The Cactus League: A Novel
By: Emily Nemens / Narrated By: Vivienne Leheny, Malcolm Hillgartner, Will Ropp, James Patrick Cronin
Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
Was okay, but if you like to think of sport figures as heroes…? OUCH
P’raps you already know, based upon earlier Baseball Listens, that I haaaate baseball. Seriously, I ask my husband a simple question and instantly I’m choosing to dissociate, rise far above my body, as he CONTINUES to spout on and on about ERAs and RBIs and how Baseball Is the Thinking Man’s Sport. Uhm, about that question I asked, like, why their uniforms are so hideous? Waaaaay off down, 30 mins. at the end of a discourse that has my eyes rolling up into the back of m’ head…
-BUT-
I love my Sis, and she requested this for her Birthday Listens/Reviews. Okay, so…
Another thing you should know: For her Listens, I gotta come at a story and contemplate whether or not she’d like an audiobook, and sometimes the two of us don’t see eye-to-eye which is amazing esPECially as we’re twins, tho’ she DID leave the womb uhm, threeee yeeeears before I did. Go figure.
So I’ll have to say that, while The Cactus League was an okay book for me? I do believe she’d haaaate it. Why? A friend of my Mom’s was an early active feminist, Woman Power and Pride, and she instilled in us rather a sense of what an honor it is to be a woman, how awesome. And just how much the world can crap on you if you’re not watching where you’re going. So Sis is verrrrrry aware of this, and she expects a great deal of women, particularly women characters, particularly how women are depicted in stories.
Enter: The women featured in The Cactus League. Now I’ll grant you that I too am soooo bored with strong women proving their worth by hefting deadweight men around, so I DID roll my eyes in exasperation as author Emily Nevens wrote the women herein. But lemme just tell you what the story is first, shall I?
We enter the book with a former sportswriter narrating this tale of the downfall of one Jason Goodyear, a star baseball player, the world is his oyster, Nike about to create a shoe named after him, and la la la all is soooo awesome for the guy. Uhm, except that he’s coming apart at the seams (Baseball reference? P’raps so!). This nameless sportswriter starts each “chapter”/story with Arizona prehistoric references, such as once upon a time, sharks swam the ocean there… until Time wiped all out and now it’s an unforgiving desert. Then he creeps his narrative onto what character from the Los Angeles Lions will be featured, and he starts with the batting coach. Then it’s onto Tammy, our first female character who is broke, living on a man’s largesse, and who is only whole when she’s using her energy and tenderness to focus on banging baseball players. Nope, not even her children were shown any tenderness, but to Jason Goodyear? Oh Gosh she is sooo THERE!
The sportswriter posits that it’s all Tammy’s fault, seeing as she involved a drunken Jason to get up to Trespassing, Property Damage, all whilst she committed Larceny. But really, Nevens just has no problem with throwing her gender under the bus. I dunno! maybe women who hang out around Spring Training and all ballparks, maybe women who are married to baseball players, maybe women who work at the popcorn stand are all, in order, Thieving Trollops, Pathetic Backstabbers, and Drug Addicts Who’ll Sell Their Kids Down the River. These are the only women in the stories, and this is what Nevens has written them as.
Seriously?
Okay, so there’s that, and I’ll stop and get off m’ soapbox about female representation and go onto more unfortunate issues, shall I? The first story of Mike, the aging Batting Coach, is awesome. I loved him, and I loved how hard it was for him to try to stay relevant. But his story is told, then it NEVER comes up again, no closure, the stories keep going on and on, and soon we discover that Closure simply isn’t in Nevens’ vocabulary. Because while all the stories are compelling, even if the women are a sorry/conniving lot, it turns out that the men are equally so, so Huzzah for Not A Single Character Being Worth Spit. There’s the pitcher back from surgery who’s now hooked on Vicodin; the organ player who downs vodka as he whiles away his life, afraid of the coming of computer software that’ll replace him; there are the wives who struggle to stay married even to the point of leaving their own children back in other states with in-laws or nannies; there’s the rookie who spends his signing bonus on a status car even as he knows he’ll be sent into the farming system; there’s the sports fan little boy whose mom is a drug addict and leaves him in a hot car to die…
I mean, I know I find the sport rather dull, but if it’s really like that? Dude, then it’s QUITE the hopping National Pastime, isn’t it? Just don’t expect ANY of these vignettes to have closure, expect them all to be flashes of compelling characterizations that go nowhere, all while loosely tied with an attempt at Highbrow with the contemplation of the passing of time considering prehistoric eras. And just who IS this sportswriter who stays on the fringes but is then thrust into a fraught ending? And who IS Jason Goodyear, and how are we supposed to worry about his fate when all that’s shown of him is that he’s despicable and pathetic? And couldn’t even ONE of the women be decent, say, the physical therapist with a JOB? But no, even she chucks a job—Which of COURSE Nevens feels compelled to add that she’s messing up her job, is lousy in relationships and chooses abusive men—and have said therapist happily toss all to the wind so that she could be subservient to the profane sports agent, turning to donning short, skimpy dresses to suit his pleasure.
Now, before I start huffing and puffing in distress, lemme quickly divert to the narrators. AWESOME. It’s pretty amazing to find a Full Cast production and have the vast majority of narrators be dynamic and capable of vocals for character switches. All, save the one who did Tammy the Sorry Wench, were gosh-danged good. And the voice for Tammy was spot-on but then she used the same tones for every woman she did, whether they were chain smoking groupies, or vain and high-spirited groupies. Same voice; exTREMEly hard to listen to as the characters were having rapid back and forth exchanges. Mike the Batting Coach was exCEPtional, and would’ve had me with a lump in m’ throat, but then Mike would go off on some profane musing, and I’d start cracking up.
Anyhoo—No, Sis would NOT like this; and tho’ I found the stories compelling, I felt soooo cheated by NOTHING tying them all together, save a baseball star falling apart. Plus the ending was so Bang! DONE! and all was over, leaving me feeling all Whazzaaa? So I can’t recommend it unless you LIKE stories that do NOT have anything to do with each other.
You might, however, really like this book if you’re a fan and want the Nitty Gritty behind the Scenes, about how deplorable all these athletes we hold up as heroes really run their lives and manage their egos. Some reviewers LOVED it, and they felt that NOW they could reeeeally hit Spring Training in the know, with eyes anew.
Alas, over here I’m dreading baseball season as I watch my husband with eyes glued to the TV, a game on, drool forming at the corners of his mouth.
The Thinking Man’s Game…?!
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