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Home: Books: Tietam Brown | |||||||||||||||
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If Freud and de Sade were
to pen story lines for WWF Smackdown! the result might be this
lurid coming-of-age novel by Foley, a former professional
wrestler and author of two bestselling memoirs, Foley Is Good
and Have a Nice Day! Andy Brown is an archetypal high school
underdog, a misshapen, motherless misfit tormented by the
football coach and tantalized by the minister's daughter. At
home, dad Tietam is an alcoholic bodybuilding enthusiast who
does nude calisthenics in the living room in between noisy
bedroom sessions with a parade of three-night-stand women; he
parents Andy by offering him beer, condoms and crude sexual
pointers. As Andy learns about manhood from dubious role models,
first-time novelist Foley finds adult fiction a truly unrefereed
arena where the wrestling sensibility can break free of PG-13
constraints. The boisterous narrative fluctuates between bawdy
picaresque and episodes of berserk violence full of smashed
teeth, crushed tracheas, gouged eyes, sudden, tables-turning
castration and heterosexual, homosexual, pedophilic and
incestuous varieties of rape. The cartoonish characters are
Oedipal tag teams battling for Andy's soul; every man is a bully
or a pervert, every woman a sentimentalized madonna/whore
duality ruined by male predation. Foley is not much of a
stylist. He mingles villainous trash-talk dialogue and stilted
sexual banter ("I'll admit right now to being somewhat
distracted by the pleasant tingling in my penile area") in a
Rabelaisian tone as self-conscious and overbearing as a large
man in tiny trunks. But readers in the mood for vigorous pulp
may enjoy this steroid-fueled brawl. Author: Mick Foley Published: July 8, 2003 Publisher: Knopf
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