The Good Body: A Novel
by Bill Gaston
from Collins Living
To say that Bill Gaston's The Good Body is hilarious is to miss the profound forest for the mesmerizing trees. Oh, The Good Body will split you with laughter (how could a story of an aging semi-pro hockey player cheating his way into a graduate creative writing program not?), but the comedy is in fact another aspect of the novel's intimate understanding of its characters. It is this closeness that wires The Good Body with an electric psychology alternately hilarious, insightful, affirming, and terrifying.
None of Bob Bonaduce's career of hockey violence prepares him for the crushing blow he receives in a doctor's office after one foot doesn't stop tingling and his hands suddenly go clumsy. Sent into the boards by the body that has given him a career, a broken marriage, and the purest grace he has ever known, Bonaduce decides to reintroduce himself to his estranged son. What better way to do that than to play hockey on the same varsity team? Life on the road has given him plenty of time to read. He's tried some writing. If he needs to be a student to play with his son, isn't creative writing really the thing? Application portfolio? Oh, Bonaduce can get around that defense.
Fellow players, housemates, ex-lovers, and classmates all meet Gaston's unflinching honesty, alternately kissed by sympathy or slashed by damning eyes. With Gaston's uniquely polymorphous talent, humor, insight, sex, and tragedy all are marks of a voice that is so comforting for the wounds it both opens and heals. --Darryl Whetter
Bobby "Loose" Bonaduce is a just-retired professional hockey player who lies his way into graduate school to lay emotional claim to his son, a student he abandoned two decades before. He is also -- unbeknownst to almost anyone -- struggling with an insidious disease that promises to rob him of the one thing that never let him down: his body.
Bobby's attempts to navigate the no-man's-land of his failed marriage, to fashion a bond with his son, and to draw upon the truths in his heart in place of the waning force of his body -- Gaston weaves all these threads into a surprisingly funny, never sentimental, but deeply moving story, full of discordant harmonies and unexpected resolutions.
Bella Combe Journal
Winter of the Wildcat (Ulverscroft Large Print Series)
The Cameraman
by Bill Gaston
from Raincoast Books
The Cameraman is a novel as timeless, engrossing, and transgressive as cinema verité. This captivating, darkly funny tale is told in "scenes" from the perspective of Francis, a cameraman who has trained his lens on the life of his friend and mentor, an enigmatic director named Koz. The plot pivots around two women: Bev, a former starlet who is involved with both men; and Sheila, a famous actress who dies on film by a lethal injection. This incident has sinister implications for director Koz, who knew what was happening, and for cameraman Francis, who didn't. Koz is brought to trial for Sheila's murder in Washington, D.C., where Francis holes up in a hotel to meditate on his relationship with the dangerous, charismatic director and on the events that led to Sheila's death. When Francis is called to testify, the sordid "truth" may be revealed.
Mount Appetite
by Bill Gaston
from Raincoast Books
Deep Cove Stories
Sointula
by Bill Gaston
from Raincoast Books
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