Double Play, a novel published in 2004
Robert B. Parker
A five CD audio book produced by Phoenix Records and read by Robert Forster (audio book link has sample of Forster's reading)
The combination of the late Robert Parker’s tight prose and Robert Forster’s laconically graceful interpretation has the poetry of a well turned double play. Parker invents one character, WWII veteran Joseph Burke and spins a yarn about a very real Jackie Robinson who breaks the color barrier in major league baseball in 1947.
Ex-Marine Burke, shot up at Guadalcanal, comes back to the states on a hospital ship with a body that can be repaired but an emotional life drained of hope and aspiration by his experience of war. After a short-lived boxing career, he’s taken on as a bodyguard for the 25 year-old spoiled daughter of a New York crime boss. He survives using his wits, strength, and lack of fear of dying.
Burke is let go after too zealously protecting Lauren and is recommended to Branch Rickey, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rickey hires him to be bodyguard for Jackie Robinson, whose presence on the baseball team will certainly provoke antagonism, and perhaps worse, amongst racist fans.
The conversations between Robinson and Burke, who keep each other at arm’s length as they travel and room together, deepen as the season progresses. The surprise of the book is Parker’s ability to have his finger on the pulse of race relations in the late 1940s and bring it to the surface in the dialogue between Robinson and Burke, two tough men who at first don’t seem to share much else than a desire to succeed at the job they’re paid for.
Burke is the center of a matrix involving a historic moment in American history and a world filled with gang bosses who fight over turf and nurse dangerous beefs with each other. The scrapes with cops, criminals, gang bosses, a headstrong woman – all are imaginatively overlaid with the day-to-day drama of Robinson’s first year in the big leagues.
Robert B. Parker was 15 years old in 1947. You can visualize him hunched over a radio to hear history unfold. If you remember the way you cherish memories from your childhood, the kind that transport you with emotional clarity when you recall them, you have an idea of the well from which he drew to write this story. He seamlessly inserts play by plays of hits, errors, pitchers, and batters through Burke's eyes as he sits near the dugout, peanuts in one hand and his .45 tucked in his belt. Forster’s reading is elegant. He channels Burke as perfectly as Parker has drawn him.
Parker usually paints the inner life of his characters with a broad brush but here, perhaps thinking about the story from his teenage obsession with Jackie Robinson and what he endured in 1947, Parker takes the time to penetrate Burke’s incapacity to access his feelings and to illuminate his upbringing (perhaps reminiscent of Parker's) that instilled his egalitarian values.
The beautifully imagined intersection of the lives of Burke, Robinson, and Lauren Roach paints a picture of three characters with universal appeal and an era now remembered in sepia tones. The enormous power of Parker’s prose and Forster’s reading drives this story right out of the park.





First Job, A Memoir of Growing Up at Work: A Picaresque Coming of Age Book
First Job, A memoir of Growing Up at Work, by Rinker Buck
Although the book purports to be about his first job, it’s really about his first acquaintance with life in the real world. And then there’s his name. Anyone named Rinker Buck was born to do something original, wild, or creative and he doesn't spoil his chance.
The first pages unfold in a succession of seemingly coincidental events and random decisions that will mark his life for the next two years. A magazine article pinned to the bulletin board of a back roads diner leads to a spur of the moment detour to the Berkshire Eagle offices in Pittsfield, MA where within seconds he literally bumps into the eccentric editor, has an impromptu job interview and is hired, at the bottom of the reportorial chain, to write obituaries.
From the first interview, one gets a sense of Buck’s natural curiosity, audacity, and roguish charm; he’s not above embroidering the truth even with the editor of the best small town newspaper in the country. During the next two years of picaresque adventures, this inexperienced, immature but increasingly self-aware guy develops a moral code that helps him stay inside the bounds of likability.
“Fix bayonets, charge downhill!” serves as both a specious Civil War story he gleefully invents during his job interview and his mantra to himself when he starts slipping on the gravel details of his life.
Although he would have us believe he is a slacker, he actually works hard. The beauty of the book is that he doesn't realize that work is, especially for a reporter, observing and living life, whether it’s playing pool at the local dive, chopping wood (which he fixates on either to sublimate sexual frustration or expel energy left over from sexual release) or hiking in the pristine Berkshire woods. That point is brought home to him in a touching exhange between him and an accomplished senior writer who helps Rinker learn the ropes of reporting.
The sub-textual story is Buck’s growth from a talented, somewhat obsessed, self-centered kid into a card-carrying adult. Three themes drive this unevenly entertaining book: his groping toward success as a writer, his education from women about the mysteries of the female sex, and his extraordinary relationships with three older men, each of whom enliven the Berkshire Eagle.
Buck’s a good story teller, and First Job is at its most poignant and occasionally hilarious when he’s under the wing of any of these three, most especially the esteemed Roger Linscott, a crusty but open hearted Pulitzer Prize winning writer, as eccentric as Rinker is horny. Linscott, older by a generation, given to eloquent polysyllabic repartee, a unique speaking style, and self-deprecatory wit, is a hoot.
Linscott is every bit as off-center as Buck. Their relationship is cemented not in the newsroom, but in the mountains and gorges of the Berkshire Hills, ‘the purple majesties,’ as Buck calls them. The time they carve out to indefatigably hike through the highlands of the Berkshires is infused with camaraderie, their insights inspired by the mutually appreciated grandeur of nature surrounding them.
What inadvertently prepared Buck for his life as a reporter and suitable companion to a Rushmore of a mind like Linscott’s is that Rinker grew up as a “book turd,” omnivorously devouring books about everything from geology to geophysics. What made him an outsider as a kid informs him beautifully as a reporter. The commentaries Buck tosses off about the flora, fauna, and geology of mountains and meadows of the Berkshires read like travel writer Bruce Chatwin’s when Chatwin’s in a groove about the Australian outback.
Buck is not as proficient at concluding his book as he is in telling its stories. The last abrupt pages yield to cereal box moralizing, a marked contrast in style and voice to what preceded it. When he’s busy spinning a yarn about a babe or the bonhomie between him and his eccentric mentors, though, he’s in his own element.
June 26, 2012 in Books, Commentaries | Permalink | Comments (0)
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