The Cactus League

November 11, 2019
In Nemens’s insightful debut, it’s 2011 and players of the L.A. Lions professional baseball team are reporting for spring training at their new facility, Salt River Fields, in Scottsdale, Ariz. Under a hot Southwestern sun, a sportswriter waits to interview the team’s golden boy, left fielder Jason Goodyear, whose handsome façade belies some unsavory secrets. Readers see Jason glancingly from eight different points of view: a put-upon batting coach whose mantra is “what would Joe DiMaggio do?”; a baseball groupie who sets her sights on him; a sports agent forced to cover up his client’s misdeeds to protect a Nike contract; the team owner with his own façade to maintain; a pitcher desperately trying to hide a painful elbow injury; the organist at the field where the Lions play; the seven-year-old son of a drug-addicted single mother who runs one of the concessions at the field; and Jason’s ex-wife, who finds herself reduced in the pecking order with the other players’ wives. Largely plotless, the book is a vivid collection of stories, as each character is brought to life in convincing detail, though the sportswriter’s interstitial musings can be intrusive. Still, this debut entertainingly illuminates people and problems usually overlooked in the sports pages.

December 1, 2019
A star left fielder for the Los Angeles Lions is in personal and professional free fall in this debut novel from the editor of the Paris Review. Jason Goodyear is a major league star: He's got a Golden Glove, solid MVP votes, and a big deal with Nike. So why is he suffering through a divorce, damaging historical property, and losing prominent endorsements? That's the question an unnamed sportswriter, the casualty of an agonizing round of newspaper layoffs, sets out to answer. Instead of going straight to the source, however, he tracks the movements of everyone adjacent to Goodyear during the 2011 spring training season in Scottsdale, Arizona. There's Tamara Rowland, a down-on-her-luck divorcée who enjoys picking up ball players for a casual fling; Stephen Smith, a partial owner of the Lions and the only black man who has any power in the franchise; William Goslin, a rookie first baseman who is flattered into helping Goodyear get out of trouble; and even a chorus of "baseball wives" who know that spring training "is a party: luncheons and spa days, cocktails and color consultations, mornings at the furrier's and afternoons with the jeweler." What emerges, however, is less a picture of Goodyear during a moment of personal crisis than a portrait of Scottsdale and its residents as they recover from the 2008 recession. The sportswriter intersperses each chapter-length character study with his own digressive musings about everything from Goodyear's motivations to belabored geological metaphors for the draft. Unfortunately, this frame narrative for Nemens' ambitious, sprawling, and otherwise impeccably written debut is an often clunky and frustrating misdirection. Although the sportswriter insists readers can understand Goodyear's inner workings by examining peers, colleagues, and characters on the periphery, he never bothers to tell us how these character studies shed light on the star player. As it turns out, Goodyear isn't really at the heart of this book at all. He's a premise rather than a true-blue character. It's a strange choice on the part of Nemens, who created a narrator uniquely situated to deliver on his initial promises--or subvert them openly and purposefully. Nemens has instead written a novel about baseball and how it shapes the lives of athletes as much as the town that supports it--and a beautiful one at that. As our narrator would put it: "It's more, He did this, he said that, and then the whole world unfurled." It simply would have been nice to know that that was the only game we were playing. Like the best sportswriting, this bighearted, finely observed novel is about far more than the game.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from February 1, 2020

DEBUT This first novel is a beautifully realized meditation on the complex, uncertain nature of daily life. "Nothing is static," Nemens's grizzled narrator, a longtime sportswriter, muses at the beginning of the story; "everything changes." The unlikely subject of his thoughts is spring-training baseball, where the unpredictable ebb and flow from season to season is dramatically visible in the performances of both teams and individual players--life's vicissitudes made manifest on the field. Set in Scottsdale, AZ, in 2011, the story chronicles the fortunes of star player Jason Goodyear, recent recipient of a Golden Glove Award and American League MVP runner-up. Things have changed significantly since last year, however. Goodyear's marriage has ended, and his passion for gambling has become a dangerous addiction he can no longer control. Nemens deftly handles the narrative arc of this story, effectively blending various plotlines involving Jason, his agent, his teammates, and his fans and bringing them all to a compelling, heartbreaking conclusion. Nemens's knowledge of the subtleties of baseball complements her philosophical content in powerful ways. VERDICT A triumphant debut; enthusiastically recommended for fans of literary fiction and great sports writing.--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2019
Nemens, appointed editor of the Paris Review in April 2018, follows in the footsteps of the magazine's illustrious founding editor George Plimpton (1927-2003) in more than one way. Like Plimpton, she knows baseball, and that knowledge is on full view in this quirky first novel set in the world of Major League spring training in Arizona. The narrative follows the Los Angeles Lions and their star outfielder, Jason Goodyear, as the team arrives in Scottsdale and begins the annual rite of preparing for the coming season. Goodyear, newly divorced and veering out of control, is at the center of a multipronged story that showcases a fascinating gallimaufry of characters who swirl around the edges of the springtime ritual, including the narrator, a sportswriter on the trail of Goodyear; various players' wives; Goodyear's agent, himself on the tag end of a legendary career; an aging batting coach; a former stadium organ player made redundant by a digital sound system; and a thirtysomething woman who haunts the ballpark looking for hookups (think Annie Savoy in Bull Durham). Spring training is, above all, a time pregnant with possibility, but Nemens shrewdly focuses on those struggling to hang on just a little bit longer, the annual opportunity for renewal?signaled by the smell of a freshly mowed infield and the sound of a crisply struck line drive?dimmed by everything from Tommy John elbows to one too many facelifts. And, yet, Nemens finds a kind of attenuated hope along with melancholy in these sharply etched character studies that "end not with 'out three' but 'out maybe.'"(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2019
A star left fielder for the Los Angeles Lions is in personal and professional free fall in this debut novel from the editor of the Paris Review. Jason Goodyear is a major league star: He's got a Golden Glove, solid MVP votes, and a big deal with Nike. So why is he suffering through a divorce, damaging historical property, and losing prominent endorsements? That's the question an unnamed sportswriter, the casualty of an agonizing round of newspaper layoffs, sets out to answer. Instead of going straight to the source, however, he tracks the movements of everyone adjacent to Goodyear during the 2011 spring training season in Scottsdale, Arizona. There's Tamara Rowland, a down-on-her-luck divorc�e who enjoys picking up ball players for a casual fling; Stephen Smith, a partial owner of the Lions and the only black man who has any power in the franchise; William Goslin, a rookie first baseman who is flattered into helping Goodyear get out of trouble; and even a chorus of "baseball wives" who know that spring training "is a party: luncheons and spa days, cocktails and color consultations, mornings at the furrier's and afternoons with the jeweler." What emerges, however, is less a picture of Goodyear during a moment of personal crisis than a portrait of Scottsdale and its residents as they recover from the 2008 recession. The sportswriter intersperses each chapter-length character study with his own digressive musings about everything from Goodyear's motivations to belabored geological metaphors for the draft. Unfortunately, this frame narrative for Nemens' ambitious, sprawling, and otherwise impeccably written debut is an often clunky and frustrating misdirection. Although the sportswriter insists readers can understand Goodyear's inner workings by examining peers, colleagues, and characters on the periphery, he never bothers to tell us how these character studies shed light on the star player. As it turns out, Goodyear isn't really at the heart of this book at all. He's a premise rather than a true-blue character. It's a strange choice on the part of Nemens, who created a narrator uniquely situated to deliver on his initial promises--or subvert them openly and purposefully. Nemens has instead written a novel about baseball and how it shapes the lives of athletes as much as the town that supports it--and a beautiful one at that. As our narrator would put it: "It's more, He did this, he said that, and then the whole world unfurled." It simply would have been nice to know that that was the only game we were playing. Like the best sportswriting, this bighearted, finely observed novel is about far more than the game.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.