Volume 19, Number 11 & 12 · January 25, 1973
Playboys and a Working Woman
By Roger Sale
Semi-Tough
by Dan Jenkins
Atheneum, 307 pp., $7.95
Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright
by Steven Millhauser
Knopf, 305 pp., $6.95
The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories
by Doris Lessing
Knopf, 308 pp., $6.95
Dan Jenkins is just playing around in Semi-Tough, his novel about a New York Giant running back and his friends during the week before a Super Bowl. He has written not a real novel, but a pretty good book of jokes. Here is Billy Clyde Puckett, hero-narrator, when asked what it's like to play pro football: 'Aw, we don't like it so much. Mainly, we just like to take showers with niggers.' And Big Ed Bookman, Fort Worth oil man: 'I just don't give one goddam how many transplant cases are walking around healthy. They're supposed to be dead, like God wanted 'em to be.' To which Shake Tiller, wide receiver and Billy Clyde's roommate, answers: 'If God had wanted man to drink more, he'd have given him two mouths.' Jim Tom Pinch, newspaperman, defines a NBA basketball game: 'Ever twenty-four seconds ten niggers jump up in the air.' Barbara Jane Bookman, Shake's girl, daughter of Big Ed, and childhood friend of Shake and Billy Clyde, as she is taking off her levis at a party the night before the Super Bowl: 'It might not be the best you've ever seen. But, well. Some people say it smells better than a soft new Italian loafer. And some people say it tastes better than strawberry shortcake.' To which Shake answers: 'What her wool actually is, is semi-tough.'
Review, 3438 words
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