Tietam Brown

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 19 MAY 2003

If Freud and de Sade were to pen story lines for WWF Smackdown! the result might be this lurid coming-of-age novel by Foley, a former professional wrestler and author of two bestselling memoirs, Foley Is Goodand Have a Nice Day! Andy Brown is an archetypal high school underdog, a misshapen, motherless misfit tormented by the football coach and tantalized by the minister's daughter. At home, dad Tietam is an alcoholic bodybuilding enthusiast who does nude calisthenics in the living room in between noisy bedroom sessions with a parade of three-night-stand women; he parents Andy by offering him beer, condoms and crude sexual pointers. As Andy learns about manhood from dubious role models, first-time novelist Foley finds adult fiction a truly unrefereed arena where the wrestling sensibility can break free of PG-13 constraints. The boisterous narrative fluctuates between bawdy picaresque and episodes of berserk violence full of smashed teeth, crushed tracheas, gouged eyes, sudden, tables-turning castration and heterosexual, homosexual, pedophilic and incestuous varieties of rape. The cartoonish characters are Oedipal tag teams battling for Andy's soul; every man is a bully or a pervert, every woman a sentimentalized madonna/whore duality ruined by male predation. Foley is not much of a stylist. He mingles villainous trash-talk dialogue and stilted sexual banter ("I'll admit right now to being somewhat distracted by the pleasant tingling in my penile area") in a Rabelaisian tone as self-conscious and overbearing as a large man in tiny trunks. But readers in the mood for vigorous pulp may enjoy this steroid-fueled brawl.