The Good Body: A Novel

After twenty years. Middle of the night, guitar on the roof, skates in the back, maybe two months' grace in the wallet....

At passing speed, squinting into the next few months, be hit the city limits....

Here he was, Bonaduce back in town.

He is Bobby "Loose" Bonaduce: professional hockey player, old-fashioned charmer, incorrigible rogue. After an athletic career spent chasing -- and never quite catching -- stardom, Bobby is facing the end of a long love affair with his own arrested adolescence. With the chasm of retirement before him, he is compelled to reach out to the family he abandoned years before, fast-talking his way into the home of Leah, the wife he left behind, and into a graduate seminar at the school where his son, Jason, is an undergrad. With valiant, bullheaded grace, Bobby wrestles with the earnest idiocies of academia, tilting desperately at writing assignments that stubbornly elude him. Yet at the same time -- unbeknownst to his family -- he is also struggling with an insidious disease that threatens to rob him of the one thing that has never let him down: his body.

Bobby's attempts to navigate the no-man's-land of his failed marriage, to fashion a kind of rough bond with his son, and to learn to trust the truths of his heart in place of the waning force in his body -- The Good Body blends all these strains into a funny, never sentimental, but deeply moving song, full of discordant harmonies and unexpected resolutions. Rich with poignancy and humor in equal measure, it marks a welcome American debut for a writer of singular insight into the human spirit.