John Grisham’s Playing for Pizza Is A Congenial Time-Waster
Written: May 16 '08 (Updated May 16 '08)
Product Rating:
Pros: Amiable and amusing
Cons: Utterly without substance. Not enough sex.
The Bottom Line: Grisham's move away from legal thrillers leaves him a bit in the lurch as this book is as substantial as cotton candy. A total time-killer.
buffoonery's Full Review: John Grisham - Playing for Pizza
John Grisham is best known as the author of legal-oriented thrillers on topics ranging from corrupt law firms to the murders of U.S. Supreme Court justices to class actions gone wrong and all points in between. I stopped reading him years ago when the combination of his increasingly incredible plots and increasingly leftish tendencies sent me packing. I haven’t given the fellow the odd thought in years.
I am a sucker for the occasional sports novel, though, and when I heard that the Grisham novel machine had moved on to the subject of football I thought, well, if it’s on the shelf at the library, why not give it a whirl. And so I picked up Playing for Pizza and engaging piffle of a novel that your garden-variety consumer of novels who needs to kill an afternoon should be able to knock off in three or four hours.
NFL quarterback Rick Dockery has a problem: In the course of eleven minutes, he managed to blow an seventeen point lead for the Cleveland Browns in the AFC championship game and thereby catapult himself to the top of the list of sports goats inhabited by such luminaries as Chicago Cub Leon Durham (blew the Cubs first shot at the World Series in eons by letting a ground ball dribble beyond him) and ex-Cub Bill Buckner (blew a Red Sox shot at the Series by letting a ground ball dribble beyond him). Cleveland fans are taking matters pretty poorly and have even attacked the hospital where Dockery is recovering from a concussion that he received has he was heaving yet another interception.
Dockery’s agent has decided that the best thing to do is to get his client out of town from carnivorous fans who want Dockery’s head and a pregnant cheerleader who wants his wallet. Far out of town. Off the continental United States, as a matter of fact, because Dockery’s next career stop is Parma, Italy, where the fighting Panthers are in need of a new quarterback. Yes, it’s NFL Europe, or playground Italy, more like it, where a jovial fellow named Signor Bruncardo likes to play at being Jerry Johnson. Given the lack of alternatives, Dockery is off to Italy.
The novel really is a bit of a piffle when it’s not being a middle-aged man’s sports fantasy: uncultured and unsophisticated QB actually finds himself enjoying the sights, sounds and cuisine of furrin land while discovering his inner qualities. It helps, of course, that he also discovers himself sharing time with a lovely UGA coed whose love of Italian art and architecture is exceeded only by her desire to sleep with older men. (Maybe that’s the middle-aged fantasy part.) The story goes from cliché to cliché (Dockery even punches out a Cleveland sportswriter who has been hounding him) until we experience Dockery’s final triumph in the Italian version of the Super Bowl as the Panthers take on the formidable Bergamo Lions.
One gets the feeling that Grisham wrote this novel because he wanted to show off that he had spent a lot of time on vacation in Italy, or at least read some travel and recipe books about it. There’s certainly plenty of local color and the two hundred and fifty-eight pages certainly roll along. But there’s not enough football and not enough sex to justify spending $21.95 on this book. Pick it up at the library and you can spend a pleasant afternoon. But, ultimately, Playing for Pizza is about as fulfilling as a box of popcorn and has zero re-reading value.
A departure from his acclaimed legal thrillers, Grisham s #1 New York Times bestseller about an American s introduction to Italian football and food i...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.