Richard D. reviewed on 5/26/2011 + 7 more book reviews

The Book Report: The eponymous Dreyfus, baseball star Randy, is an All-American Guy with a wife and two daughters. We meet him with that family as he opens a strip mall named for him near his suburban California home. Randy is a man with a problem, however: He's coming to know, at age 28, that he is really a gay man living a straight man's dream life. He's fallen in love with D.J. Pickett, second baseman to his pitcher (the joke here will become obvious in the review), despite the existence of a perfect wife, blonde and beautiful and hot for him. Not only is D.J. a man, he's a BLACK man! The scandal, the shock, the general all-around kerfuffle that ensues when the two men are caught in a clearly sexual situation! But true to Mr. Lefcourt's Hollywood writing pedigree, there is A Happy Ending. No, not *that* kind of happy ending, get your mind out of the gutter! This isn't a romance novel, it's A Love Story. Even the subtitle says so.

My Review: I'd love to live in the America of the ending of this book. In fact, what with some more adventurous sports stars like Ben Cohen starting to come out as against bullying and homophobia as cultural forces, it might *be* this world soon. Why, he's even started a foundation to combat these pernicious, ancient evils! Good on him, and his wife, and his two kids! But he was released from his international rugby-playing job after he started talking about these matters, despite being the MVP for his team. Plus he's over 30, which in rugby as in football means headin' for the barn. Still, bravo for doing it. Now, the reaction to this in the rugby-playing world has been muted because of his superstar status, but I note a singular quietude among teams in his former league.

Pro sports is not gonna welcome or acknowledge gay players if they're not even gonna let a gay-FRIENDLY guy work to change his childrens' world while working for them. So I find the Hollywood ending of the book, with the two men walking onto the field together to play a World Series game, poignantly amusing if improbable to the point of alternate-Universe-ness.

But the trip to get there is, well, amusing and improbable: the soon-to-be-ex-wife is all sympathy and understanding, a thing no woman of my acquaintance is when she's being left for someone else, and I mean *not*one*of*them* who've had it happen, the two daughters not being shown to be bullied mercilessly for having a fag-daddy (ha!), and the Salty Old Sports Columnist coming out (oops) in their favor...! Oh the glories of Lefcourt's imagination! Let this world come into being, and soon, if you please o kind and beneficent God! (Another improbable-to-the-point-of-humor concept.)

And then there are the odd choices, like making D.J. a black man who's the bottom and Randy a white top who plays *pitcher*! Top and bottom (pitcher and catcher, get it?), for the straight, are the sexual positions of the parties. They are also the source of stress and tension in the gay mating market, because logically two men having sex can't BOTH do the same thing at the same time, and a great big stigma attaches to the bottom (I hope I don't need to explain the source of these names...that would be too depressing...although Randy, our hero with the porn name {srsly, RANDY?!}, is specifically revealed to be clueless about how to satisfy his lust for D.J. until a specific moment quite late in his 28 years of life!), as it does to the effiminate man. In other words, homophobia among the homos is alive and well. And Lefcourt chose an ethnic minority for his secondary character that has historically been completely, utterly, and often violently unsupportive of gay life. I have to wonder why he did that. Oh, but never fear: We're not given any actual sex to wince over, straight people. It's all implied. Honest and truly.

And baseball is, I mourn to report, an ever-more-marginal sport. In Murrika today, the uber-violent and pointless and boring football (which involves feet only tangentially, so far as I can see) is the dominant sport. Why pick on poor, fading baseball? Although the venality, the coarseness, and the criminality of the management are played against that sport's backdrop, I feel very sure that the same behaviors, attitudes, and law-breakings would happen in any of the professional sports. They're handling a LOT of money here. No way in hell does that not attract, if not breed, criminality. It simply can't help but do so.

So why'd I read it? And why would I recommend it? Because it's upbeat and it's nicely plotted and it's got its moments of trenchant commentary. Everybody needs a fairy tale every now and then. In baseball season, let this be yours.

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