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''Fucking yahoos,'' Chucky says.
''What are they?''
''Line-dancing conventions. Whitest people on Earth - them and Mormons. They're fucking everywhere. I go to a new town, and it's full of cowboys.'' He takes a drag of his cigarette. ''Every single fucking town. I can't shake them.'' He frowns. '' I hate cowboys.''
''I don't get them,'' I say. ''Cowboys.''
I am fascinated by professional sports. Each one of them is its own pantheon of pagan gods : hockey, baseball, football, mixed martial arts and my favorite, basketball. I remember growing up watching Larry Bird, Scottie Pippen, Gary Payton and Penny Hardaway, appreciating the distinct personality of their game, but not really understanding they were human beings. I'm not alone with this fascination. The world of sports appealed to Rob Roberge too. His novel DRIVE is a powerful testament to how a sport became a business, a culture, an institution and the kind of people it shaped. How can you survive a flirt with immortality and go on with your life?
Ben Thompson (who I imagined to look something like this) was a college hoops star. A deadly shooter with a 42 inches vertical leap who got his career cruelly snatched away from him by an all too common knee injury. After drifting for close to a decade, beating alcoholism and being a miserable freelance painter, Ben is offered a second lease on life by small-time magnate Rube Parcell, who just bought the Sarasota Sun, a basketball team in the bushiest of bush leagues, the Gulf Coast League. Ben accepts the offer to coach the team, not knowing what else to do, but when he finds himself facing the game and the broken dreams of everybody, a very important truth emerges : One way or another, Ben Thompson belongs on a basketball court.
I have Caleb J. Ross to thank for this. Rob Roberge is a terrific, underrated talent. DRIVE was an emotional ride for me and despite its short length (176 pages), it felt as nourishing as the best 500 page novel one can find. Roberge has this gift to draw these magical moments where life seems to write itself before your very eyes. These moments that make you feel alive like nothing else. The unexpected late night existential discussions, the quiet evenings at the bar turned epic, the moments where you witness someone you care about do something great. DRIVE chronicles all that and much more, through the eyes of Ben Thompson, who gradually blossoms with the novel.
'' No one is what they are. All the supermodels - they think they're actresses. The actors? They're directors. The bag boy at your supermarket? He's a screenwriter. She's not a topless cleaner, she just plays one on TV.''
DRIVE is...well, a character-driven novel. Rob Roberge built an all-star cast he elaborated from clichés. My favorite was Rube Parcell, the cigar-smoking magnate who seems like the money-first cliché at the start, but ends up being so, so much more. Parcell discovers himself a real motivator talent and he takes pleasure in seeing his positive behavior affect Ben and shape the destiny of his team. Roberge does that for several characters in the novel. He takes a cliché idea and carves a human being out of them. It's a bold idea that could have gone wrong at any moment, but he makes it work and it makes for the most beautiful kind of deceit.
Reading DRIVE was a special experience for me, because I have been around broken dreams of several people myself. Rob Roberge highlights an important truth with his novel : life goes on. You're the only captain of your ship and if you keep living life and doing what you really love, good things will happen. Roberge expresses that truth with subtlety and gracefulness and at no time he tries to shove it down our throats in a didactic manner. I am tempted to certify it BADASS, but it was too much of a personal reading to make that call. But read DRIVE, people. Knowing basketball will heighten your enjoyment of the novel a little bit, but it's in no way necessary. It's just a magnificent story about people piecing each other back together. It redefined sports fiction for me.