UNDER THE GOAL POSTS
By Eddie Dooley '27. 208 pp., John Lowell Pratt.
As one could guess, it is a football novelor rather "another" football novel. The hero is Chuck Arnold. The girl is Nancy Marshall. The college is Colburn. The college is Sanford. Chuck, off the squad his junior year' because of personal disagreement with the coach, manages, by dint of going to sea and working on construction jobs during his summer vacation, to win the final ball game and the girl as the story blacks out rather unsatisfactorily.
As commercial writing Under the GoalPosts should be successful. Any book built so patently on the Frank Merriwell pattern is certain to be. But certainly, it can lay no claim to any legitimate literary pretensions, as I think Mr. Dooley would be the first to affirm. It is not good writing. Perhaps it was written—(or dictated?) on some rainy Friday morning when there was nothing else to do. Its style is unreal and unconvincing—far, far below Mr. Dooley's rather excellent sports columnism in TheSun.
It is supposed to be the story of a "typical" college quarterback. Probably that fact robs it of any significance, for quarterbacks aren't "typical". They are all quite different; and certainly not so routineminded and trite-talking as this Chuck Arnold.
I hope that Eddie will try again after: (1) Reading Percy Marks' The UnwillingGod as well as the Epes Todd part of George Weller's Not To Eat Not for Love. (2) Realizing that football players in 1933 do not talk and think like Chuck Arnold. (3) Believing that Behind the Goal Posts is hasty, unconsidered writing and that hehas done and can do a better job.
