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2007, Scribner INTERVIEWS, BLOGS, AND SUCH:
The rights of MVP are
managed by agent Adrienne Rosado of
Nancy Yost Literary Agency. |
MVP: A Novel Superstar
Gilbert Marcus rapes and kills a young woman in a hotel room during the off-season.
That's the prologue. MVP is Marcus's life story from conception to his act of
incredible violence. Raised an only child -- the son of a difficult and
demanding father -- Gilbert Marcus, a basketball player with extraordinary
skill, is expected to be the greatest. His life is one of both excessive
privilege and immutable obligation. He becomes a monster. James Boice is a
startling and exciting new voice in fiction, and MVP is his ambitious and
fascinating debut. "I am unable to compare MVP
with any other works of literature, simply because I've never read any other
books that are remotely like this. It's an astounding synthesis of reality,
imagination, and psychological clarity. James Boice is going to crush the world." —Chuck Klosterman "An incredible
novel." —Sherman Alexie Starred Review.
This stunning debut from Boice opens with Gilbert, a pro basketball star,
raping and murdering a young woman in a Las Vegas resort. Boice then circles
back to an account of Gilbert's warped life, largely spent beneath the
demanding thumb of Gilbert's washed-up ballplayer father, Mervin, who sees in
Gilbert a chance to capture the greatness that eluded him. Thus, Gilbert
endures a regimen of awful health food (Mervin: "Death begins in the
colon!") and endless drills (running alongside his father's car in the
dark while Mervin throws coins at his head). Gilbert jumps straight from high
school to the pros, where he racks up championships and MVP awards and
secures global superstardom while still just an insecure (yet grossly
narcissistic) man-child who is both seduced and tormented by the sex- and
celebrity-obsessed culture he sits atop. Changing fortune brings a tanking
team, a nationally televised humiliation, and money and marital problems, and
the cracks in Gilbert's psyche begin to spread ominously. When Boice revisits
that night in the Vegas hotel room, Gilbert's path from a lonely, sensitive
boy to the monster choking an unnamed girl is clear, convincing and shocking.
With its bristling intelligence and crystalline prose, this provocative novel
secures Boice's status as a player to watch. —Publishers Weekly Basketball star Gilbert Marcus,
the refined son of an ex-jock, enters the pros straight from high school,
gets a rival teammate traded after three straight titles, and is accused of a
violent crime while committing adultery. Sound familiar? James Boice's MVP
is a brutally incisive roman ˆ clef. Boice may not be an insider, but he
seems to have opinions about Kobe Bryant. His jarring stream-of-consciousness
prose clicks once you realize he's given his narcissistic protagonist the
deranged neuroses of a Bret Easton Ellis character. His portrait of Marcus is
a frightening trip through the misogynistic, homophobic mind of a
professional athlete. A- —Entertainment Weekly James Boice's
electric debut appears exploitative and tasteless in its opening moments,
when basketball superstar Gilbert Marcus rapes and accidentally kills a young
woman in a Las Vegas hotel room. But MVP (Scribner, 352 pp., $15) isn't
simply capitalizing on the Kobe Bryant scandal three years ago. Rather, the
novel offers an astute portrait of the kind of man who panics not because
he's committed manslaughter, but "because if it comes out he is associating
with casino owners, his career could be over and his name disgraced and he'll
lose his endorsements and never be voted into the Hall of Fame." After the killing, the novel
jumps back to Marcus' childhood as the son of a professional bench-warmer. Young Gilbert submits to training that
crosses the line into abuse, and his diet is punctuated with gluten burgers
and protein shakes because, as his father believes, "Death begins in the
colon!" The result is a boy-man with tremendous skill on the court and
little understanding of himself. "MVP" may be about
basketball players, but it also succeeds in depicting the sullied underbelly
of contemporary professional sports. More importantly, Boice allows us to
witness the creation of an unapologetic social monster. —Cleveland Plain Dealer "Dark, sordid,
creepy and not exactly beach reading, but good luck putting it down." —ESPN Magazine "A fantastic,
chilling portrait of a vain pro athlete." —Chicago
Tribune "[James Boice] masterfully
employs a style all his own."
—Boston
Magazine "There's a
jittery brilliance...[James Boice] has considerable stylistic flair." —Kirkus Reviews ̉The best novel I've read in a
while.Ó —Village Voice |
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