Note: Please enjoy my review of Samantha Harvey’s new novel Orbital for Chicago Review of Books, linked here.
“Stricken; sphere, star, speck.” These are stages in the flight of a golf ball before it falls from view. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom has been hacking away, and now this is his first good drive. His opponent is Jack Eccles, an Episcopal priest with a decent game, who is trying to talk him into returning to his wife and child, Janice and Nelson. Rabbit has walked, or really driven out on them, a little over a hundred pages previous. He didn’t get far, returning to Brewer (a fictional Pennsylvanian city) and calling on his old high school basketball coach Tothero for a place to stay. Since then he has gotten together with Tothero’s girlfriend’s friend, Ruth, a prostitute who might be retiring for him. Probably no stroke has ever been this important. Eccles, whom he tells he left Janice to look for some special “thing”, says Rabbit has a “beautiful natural swing” when he doesn’t try to use his height; he thinks of the rented clubs he’s been grappling with as versions of Janice and Ruth; this time the drive has a “hollowness, a singleness he hasn’t heard before”; it carries well, and he cries, “That’s it!”