Secondary Characters Shine Brightest in “The Big Game is Every Night” https://ift.tt/u0d1wrJ
Every Friday night, fifteen-year-old Grady’s father texts him before his football game: “Good luck. Play mean.” It’s the only time they ever speak, the only thing they have to speak about. Grady Hayes, protagonist of Robert Maynor’s debut novel The Big Game is Every Night, lives in a small South Carolina town with his mother, who struggles to make ends meet with her twenty-four-hour nursing job. Out of necessity, she treats Grady more like a roommate than a son, coming and going at all hours, rarely keeping tabs on him. He is, after all, a good kid — a kid who gets his homework done on time, who goes to class, who doesn’t like drinking, whose friends all have a singular focus: football.
For Grady, football gives his life purpose and direction: “We wanted to play under the big lights, sure. Compete with the best. But really, there was no choice. It was the only way to go.” And it takes only one play in one game against a rival school to take all of that away, spinning him into a depression so deep he questions his understanding of himself and all that he has worked for.
In The Big Game is Every Night, Maynor explores the story of a working-class, Southern teen with few options in life. Maynor’s subtle but pointed use of colloquialisms interwoven alongside details of Grady’s hometown evokes the feel of the place without straying into cliché.
The book’s cast is convincingly drawn: there is opinionated Lydia, the would-be love interest who sells boiled peanuts out of her father’s peanut trailer; father-figure Marcus, who is “like a fortune cookie, mostly full of bullshit disguised as insight, but sometimes vague and applicable enough to make you think twice.” Even Grady’s football rival, Quinton, and friend-of-convenience (and bad influence), Hambone, demonstrate enough peculiarity and familiarity to draw a reader in — to remind them of places they knew, people they grew up with, troubles they experienced. Where I struggled to connect though, is in the characterization of Grady himself, who is passive throughout the novel, a worm on the end of a hook in someone else’s stream.
Maynor utilizes first person point-of-view but doesn’t seem to capitalize on the natural benefits of that choice: increased interiority and emotional closeness to the main character. Instead, he adopts a sparse prose that reads like an observant, uninvolved narrator. Coupled with Maynor’s tendency to cut dramatic scenes short, this point-of-view choice creates a distance to Grady’s voice that at times makes it difficult to empathize with him. Read another way, though, this distance conveys Grady’s dissociation from the events of his life and the subsequent consequences of nonaction. But as a character, he is overshadowed by the supporting cast, who largely direct the action of the story.
Even so, there are moments of clarity, of insightful prose that allow us to see inside Grady’s head, into the complexities of what it means to be a young, white male in the contemporary South grappling with family and regional history amidst a growing awareness of what’s right. One of the most developed relationships in the book is between Grady and his mother; his recognition of her fallibility marks an important turning-point in his downward spiral: “we were just two people living in the same house, spinning in the same circle, making our own choices that kept bumping into one another. Mom had no power over me, and I hated her for that.”
Ultimately, The Big Game delivers a level of realness of setting that a reader can admire and enjoy; however, I found its main character arc somewhat less satisfying. Regardless, there is enough truth in Maynor’s debut to demonstrate his talent, and I look forward to reading his next work.
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