Billy Boy
A Novel
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4.6 • 10 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Not since Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show has a novelist captured the poignant contradictions of young manhood in the American West the way Bud Shrake does in Billy Boy. And no novel has ever combined history, spirituality and golf into so potent a triumph of the human spirit.
There are tough times ahead for sixteen-year-old Billy. He's just come to Fort Worth with his father, Troy, after the death of his mother back in Albuquerque. Troy's drinking and gambling will leave them all but penniless, and he'll soon move on and abandon Billy in this strange town to fend for himself. With only a vague idea of how he's going to live, Billy heads over to Colonial Country Club, where he hopes he can get work as a caddie and where he just might see his hero, Ben Hogan. What he finds there, under the watchful eye of his guardian spirit, teaches him unforgettable lessons about golf, life, love and honor.
In Billy Boy, longtime novelist and screenwriter Bud Shrake takes us back to the early 1950s, in a story thick with the Texas dust. Hardscrabble Billy, tough as he thinks he is and smarter than he knows, makes a place for himself behind the walls of privilege at Colonial. He first draws the approval, then the ire, of the club's most eccentric millionaire member, while his looks and manner draw the attention of the millionaire's beautiful granddaughter -- to the displeasure of her boyfriend, the club champion. Billy survives a fierce initiation and a dreadful scene with his drunken father -- but most important, he comes in contact with two of the greatest figures in the history of golf in Texas, Ben Hogan and John Bredemus, each of whom takes Billy under his wing for different reasons and with different results.
Shrake skillfully weaves these historical figures and his richly drawn characters into the fabric of the town and the tenor of the time. Billy must face down his fears and doubts, and he does so in a climactic confrontation that combines the yearnings of youth with the redemption of the spirit. Billy Boy is an unforgettable novel of coming of age in a time and a place filled with mythic echoes and frontier dreams.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As has been the case with so many of Shrake's novels, particularly the absurdly overwritten historical, The Borderland, this new offering, despite its charms, suffers from a lack of careful composition. That's a shame, since it's built on a great premise and could have been a superb childhood fantasy blended with genuine golf history. It's 1949, and Billy, after the death of his mother, finds himself in Fort Worth with his father, a drunken war veteran with a gambling problem. He sets out to become a caddy at the famed Colonial Country Club, where he is assigned to eccentric millionaire Ira Sandpaster. Billy is quickly branded a jinx by the irascible old man because he makes a suggestion that might improve Sandpaster's game. Despondent, Billy encounters the ghost of John Bredemus, legendary course architect, and the shade serves as the boy's guardian angel, ultimately engineering a meeting with golf legend Ben Hogan. Hogan takes Billy under his wing and initiates a match between the boy, who has had no formal training in golf, and the obnoxious club champion, Sonny Stonekiller, the erstwhile steady beau of Sandpaster's beautiful, spoiled granddaughter, Sandra. Shrake, as usual, pits the grotesquely rich against the heroically innocent and lets coincidence save the day, but the novel fails to develop either convincing characters or a captivating story. Fort Worth in the '40s is ripe for exploitation, but the novel slices into the rough, and potentially interesting developments are abandoned. This is Shrake in his stride but not at his best; it's a double bogey that will leave readers yearning for him to return to the birdie strokes of Blood Reckoningand Strange Peaches.
