★★★☆☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
What a depressing, sad, miserable book. I read this for the literary reviews and the focus on boxing, but wow. I had a hard time getting through this short book. The pointless dialogue that would go on for pages between Tully and his girlfriend was grating (I suppose it was meant to be). The whole book was a misery.
Highlights
Pigeons the color of the street pecked in the gutters, flew between buildings, marched along ledges and cooed on Tully’s sill. His room was high and narrow. Smudges from oily heads darkened the wallpaper between the metal rods of his bed. His shade was tattered, his light bulb dim, and his neighbors all seemed to have lung trouble.
In the dressing room with a towel around his waist, Tully brought a pint of Thunderbird from his athletic bag, and sensitive to its impropriety here in the YMCA, he took a drink with the metal door of his locker blocking him from Ernie’s view. In the ceiling a ventilator labored in vain against the odors of sweat and soap and musty athletic clothes.
That period had been the peak of his life, though he had not realized it then. It had gone by without time for reflection, ending while he was still thinking things were going to get better.
Boxers were men in other towns, in big cities far from this car parked in the darkness alongside the highway between fields of vegetables.
They were all so vulnerable, their duration so desperately brief, that all he could do was go on from one to another in quest of that youth who had all that the others lacked.