What follows is an increasingly nightmarish descent into Nineteen’s brain-damaged psyche, pushed against the brutality of the world he’s leaving behind, in his lost career and family, and the world he enters into as he looks for a miracle cure for what is likely the same chronic traumatic encephalopathy suffered by so many ex-football players. This is in the jacket copy, more or less, so it’s not a spoiler to say all this happens early in the novel: Nineteen’s playing days-and his fortune-are both over and lost before page fifty. But things go wrong, as the story demands they must.
Known to the reader only by his jersey number, Nineteen retires early, injured but seemingly destined to slide into what should be a life of fame and fortune and ease. Tune in online Tuesday, Jfor Strange Light Presents: Eugene Marten in Conversation with Defector editor David Roth-registration is free.Īt first glance, Eugene Marten’s fifth novel Pure Life (Strange Light) might sound like a departure from the subject material of his previous books, beginning as it does with the archetypal ascent of a small-town high school football player to NFL stardom.
Talking to the author of Pure Life about brand names as verbal death, distrusting omniscience in fiction, and elite semicolon use.
