Tietam Brown
By Mick Foley
Knopf, $23.95
If Mick Foley were as good at writing fiction as he's been at capitalizing on his wrestling fame, we might have a literary success on our hands.
He isn't.
No disrespect, Mr. Foley — we value our forelimbs. But judged by the finicky standards book reviewing is supposed to apply (imagination, originality, like that), this novel is a dud.
Maybe it shouldn't be estimated as such. As Young Adult fiction, for instance, 'Tietam Brown' might do just fine. It's by a prominent sports-entertainment figure with a well-advertised heart of gold, a wife, three kids, a home on Long Island and two best-selling memoirs that purported to tell it like it really is about growing up and becoming a bone-crunching star. (He lost an ear in one match.)
Take that resumé and write a simpleminded feel-good novel about a troubled teenage boy with a heart of gold, and parents would have to look no further when stocking-stuffer time rolls around.
But then you'd have to take out all the really gross parts — about how young Antietam Brown (named for a great-great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War) lost his ear, about why his parents broke up, about how bad the abuse was in foster homes, about his father's sex life and about his own aspirations for one of those with Terri, the hard-core Christian homecoming queen who chooses him over the steroid-popping jocks and their evil coach Hanrahan.
Leave them in, and you've got a book about as specious as a World Wrestling Entertainment bout — an event manufactured to look much more serious than it actually is.
Such faux bravado was all well and good when it came to the former WWE commissioner's autobiographical dalliances, fittingly published by Regan Books. But by switching genres and publishers, Foley ostensibly opted for a higher class of sass.
Even the humor in "Tietam Brown" falls flat. It's delivered in the voice of a youngster whose optimistic naivete, we're asked to believe, has somehow survived the most degraded circumstances — a small-town high school not necessarily the least among them.
"Two ropes hung from the ceiling like an X. ... Panties, hundreds of them, were hanging from these ropes. 'Not bad, huh, son?' said my father, sounding content and peaceful, bordering on serene. I was unable to respond, my jaw being once again locked temporarily in Dickensian caroling mode."
Unscramble those metaphors, crush those cliches, unhand that Playboy. Or go back to Judith Regan.
Originally published on July 26, 2003