In my private corner, I spit on the ground. I tell myself I will come back to that thing I've left – that spit – in fewer than ten minutes, and I will have won. I've done this thing so many times that I know when twelve minutes are up, I'm on a schedule, I'm a creature of habit and something clicks, and then I go from privacy into the gym and to the edge of the mat and wait for my opponent, I'm skin and gristle and little water, Stephen Florida without end Amen.
Steven Forster was an orphan and a somewhat talented high school wrestler when a full-ride scholarship to a mediocre college landed in his lap – albeit getting his name completely wrong – and with no other options or ambitions, Stephen Florida was born. I know I often complain about writers with MFAs having had the juice educated out of their writing – and that's very nearly the case here, with writing that feels very deliberately crafted instead of craftily effortless – but author Gabe Habash has written a character so peculiar yet identifiable, and created such a weird and uncanny atmosphere in which to place this unlikeable antihero, that I ended this book with nothing but admiration for what Habash was able to achieve (even if I can't say I really liked the book itself). And note: With a daughter, Kennedy, who was a one season high school wrestler – she effortlessly made her way through the ranks to the Provincials, where she first encountered someone trying to actively hurt her, and suffering bruised ribheads requiring medical attention in the first match at that level, she lost her nerve and retired from the sport – I had enough familiarity with the wrestling world to perfectly visualise these scenes. Also note: Kennedy relayed to me the "checking the oil" move the first time she was told about it, but being a girl, the old "five-on-two" never came into play.
Although Florida is single-mindedly focussed on wrestling – he's in his senior year of college as the book begins, so he has one last chance to fulfill a promise to his dead grandmother to one day win a national championship in her honour – he has also been meeting his course requirements throughout the years; somehow absorbing a liberal arts education along the way. Having earned B's and C's in such classes as Culture of Global Capitalism, Arthurian Romance, and What is Nothing?, Florida's inner monologue – juvenile, narcissistic, unpolished – is studded with learnings despite himself, leading to nicely jarring passages like this one:
What I'm thankful for: this season, drive, motivation, success lust, that I'm not fat, that I'm not a handicapped, that I don't have fucking spina bifida, that no one can hear my thoughts except me, that activeness forestalls the sludge of the cosmos, that my hands are big for my size, Linus, Oregsburg, that my great-grandpas put it in my great-grandmas and that my grandpas put it in my grandmas and that my dad put it in my mom, that I wasn't born in King Leopold's Congo or Siberia, that my sinuses are a high mountain cave and there is a little grendel in there tending her mushrooms, that I'll never have too much time on my hands, that there are other wrestlers out there waiting for me to come tear them down, my grandma, that I have a job to do.Hints are dropped throughout about the hardships Florida has faced – from the early loss of his parents and childhood best friend to his fellow college students avoiding him as “cute but weird” – but in the first section of this book, things are looking up: he's winning his meets, he's found a sort of friend to mentor in a talented Freshman wrestler, he's found a sort of girlfriend in a warmhearted artist, and he's found a sort of family in an aunt who reaches out from the blue. We're always in Stephen Florida's head, so any rays of sunshine are a relief from his sudden bouts of violence, his bizarre proclamations, the Suicide Prevention pamphlets in his desk drawer. But when things start to fall apart for Florida, not only do increasingly strange events start to occur in the outside world – a green notebook full of poetry and dark warnings, a strange confession via CB radio, a gorilla mask in the shower – but his inner obsessions extinguish any sense of hope:
More and more things keep happening to me. Insignificant things and significant things and boring things and sacred things and terrible things and nice things and strange things. They disguise themselves as new events but really I know what they are, they're ancient events that have happened before and they've just run to the back of the line to wait their turn again.The tension and uncertainty made for such a charged reading experience: Stephen Florida wants one thing – a national wrestling championship – and while on the one hand he's pretty unlikeable and hard to root for, on the other, his focus on rigorous training, asceticism, and self-denial (and as graduation approaches, the realisation that his college education hasn't prepared him for a job in the real world) makes the reader believe that he has earned this one thing when the world has given him so little else. A sports book has a concrete form – a setup, a setback, a final showdown that can end in one of two ways – but with such a disturbed main character and an atmosphere that kept me off-balance, Habash pretty much transcends the formula: ultimately, the plot (and its often unnecessarily bizarre twists) was less important than character/setting/atmosphere, and I'm sure I preferred it that way.
