Well I seem to have read, and enjoyed, a golfing novel which will surprise and amuse several regular readers of this blog. You know who you are. The Amateur was published last month so I think I probably saw it listed in the books pages of Good Housekeeping (definitely its best section) and fancied it. It’s Chris Bohjalian’s 26th novel but I have to confess that, until now, his work was new to me.
Mira is an excoriatingly reliable and honest narrator with, for very good reasons, serious self-esteem problems. Today she is a happily married, successful novelist looking back at, and writing a memoir about, formative, or deformative, experiences in the 1980s.
She was a promising golfing prodigy and a teenage leading light at her local golf club in Tallmadge, a fictional small town within commuting distance of New York City. One day, while she’s practising at the nets, one of her balls flies through a hole in the net and kills Kenny Foster, a young caddy whom she knows from school. That is the starting point for an exploration of the effects of guilt and blame, complicated in Mira’s by a sexual relationship which began with a much older, married man when she was only 15 which makes him a paedophile. She becomes irrationally convinced that the former is her punishment for the latter. So she “does” drugs, gives up golf, and refuses to take up her place at Yale. She finds living with herself very difficult
The plot of this surprisingly arresting novel is underpinned by the escalating legal case. Who or what was responsible for Kenny’s death? How did the net acquire its hole? Had someone ripped away the target which was attached to it? If so who? Had the manufacturer sold the club a faulty net? Was the club negligent? Should the net have been erected so close to the caddies’ quarters? The Foster family do not blame Mira but she blames herself and repeatedly says “I killed Kenny.” Literally of course, she did, but that doesn’t make her culpable in law.
The characterisation is, as in most novels, what really drives The Amateur. Mira is a complex, confused young woman given to volatile outbursts such as trashing someone’s car with a golf club a few years before the opening of the novel. But we sympathise with, and warm to, her not least because she presents herself with such naked honesty. Her well-meaning parents don’t understand half of what is troubling her and she worries about their alcohol dependence although her lawyer father takes charge and ensures she gets the best support in the legal case against her. The most likeable character of all is Ethan, a 29-year-old Vietnam veteran who arrives towards the end of the novel and epitomises common sense, decency and kindness.
It’s pretty gripping reading and although it’s shot through with esoteric golfing language and references, my lack of understanding (I don’t engage with any form of sport) didn’t seem to matter much. I had to look up LPGA though: Ladies Professional Golf Association. Ultimately, of course, it’s over-simplistic and belittling to call The Amateur a “golfing novel”. It simply explores human experience as every novel does – rather well in this case. The setting could easily have been, for example, a horse riding club, a fairground or a swimming pool. But golf works because it’s so very popular in America where, presumably, everyone knows what birdies and bunkers are and who the Pro is. And even I know that a golf ball going at full tilt is as powerful as a bullet.
I shall be interested to try more Chris Bohjalian novels.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Justine by Lawrence Durrell
