While Sooley is John Grisham’s first basketball novel, it is his fourth sports themed novel, and the most recent one. I actually picked up a copy at a good bookstore in Izmir, Turkey while leading a tour, and of the sports novels this is best of the bunch. It is first rate beach reading, and it has a social conscience as well about what has been and continues to be happening in south Sudan, with millions starving, partly due to rebels running around and torching towns that belong to other tribes. While the American edition is about 496 pages, the Turkish edition was 355….. but with really miniscule print. Fortunately I have really miniscule pupils (no I don’t mean my seminary students!).
As usual, Grisham’s style is spare and directly to the point with lots of very short chapters to keep you reading. It is the opposite of Umberto Eco’s latest which on page one has a 20 line long sentence. The story revolves around Samuel Sooleymon (a common last name in that part of the world), a 17 year old who can jump out of the gym but needs to find his shooting form. He eventually makes the south Sudan international traveling team that goes to America, mainly to play some games and show off the foreign talent in hopes that some of the young men will get college scholarships and a very few will make it to the NBA. This whole process is set against the backdrop of ongoing civil war in South Sudan, and Sooley’s town becomes a victim of rebel violence, with various members of his family displaced to a refugee camp in Uganda. While on the surface Sooley seems to be a happy go lucky kid who loves basketball, actually he spends most of his time worrying about his family back home, and hoping to extract them from a hopeless situation in a refugee camp. To his credit Grisham doesn’t go in for the gory details of the carnage in south Sudan, as he doesn’t use violence or sexually explicit scenes to spice up his novels. Sadly, this approach is a rarity in recent pulp fiction.
The story chronicles the rapid growth (6 inches in a year, and 50 some pounds) of Sooley as he begins to play for N.C. Central, a historically black college in Durham N.C. But with the physical growth comes an incredible growth in skilled shooting, as Sooley becomes the Steph Curry of his day, bombing away from 25-30 feet at times, and also providing highlight dunks. The basketball parts of this story are very enjoyable if you are a basketball nut like me, who used to play the game, and as it turns out John Grisham also used to play the game and still loves it. Neither of us were good enough to really play college ball.
Grisham knows well the shadier side of the recruiting process, and the whole college basketball industry, and he does not spare his criticism of much of the corruption and hypocrisy involved in that whole enterprise, especially as it relates to one and done players who end up in the NBA. He is equally unsparing in his criticism of rich nations like the U.S. that don’t do enough to stop starvation from happening in south Sudan and elsewhere. As I write this, it is happening again in that land due to the Russian embargo on grain from Ukraine to such needy countries.
While this is a more true to life, rather than ‘they all lived happily ever after story’, it does have a redemptive theme by the time we get to the end of the novel and a salutary warning about the dangers of drugs when it comes to college and professional athletes. It is a rare novel that both entertains and at the same time pricks the conscience of its audience, but this is one of them. Well done brother Grisham.
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