Life > March 6, 2008

By CeCe Brooks | Life editor

I don’t know if anyone else had this problem on a family road trip, but every time I went on a long trip with my parents, they ALWAYS listened to annoying books on tape. Of course, they also played them at ridiculous decibels because they’re old and going deaf, so it was impossible to ignore.

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The reason I mention this little fact is these experiences were how I became familiar with John Grisham’s books.

Although I wish I wasn’t forced to listen to said tapes, Grisham’s weren’t half bad.

As a former lawyer, Grisham’s stories were interesting and often suspenseful stories revolving mostly around law. I have only read one of his non-legal novels, Playing for Pizza, but (in this novel at least) Grisham fails to create the same captivating story he usually does.

Continuing with his tradition of drawing from his real-life interests, Pizza is a football story.

Rick Dockery is the kind of athlete that we tend to forget about: the player who is good enough to make it to the next level (college, then professional), but as he transitions from each level, Rick becomes less and less of a star.

He goes from being a high school star quarterback, to relatively successful first-stringer at Iowa and finally to the NFL, but here he begins to fall behind the curve.

He is the quintessential third-string quarterback.

He has been to six teams in seven years and at his last gig for the Cleveland Browns, Dockery makes such a mockery of himself he must say goodbye to the NFL forever.

After an embarrassing performance in a playoff game that cost the Browns the league championship, Dockery is a laughing stock and unemployed. His agent somehow manages to find a team that wants him. The only catch is it is in Parma, Italy.

Rick is one of only a couple of paid players, the rest of whom play for the joy of the game.

Rick must adjust to many things: life in another country, a completely different environment (football is so unpopular they play in a rugby stadium) and his new role as team savior.

Surprisingly, Rick really finds his niche in the Italian Football league and eventually finds peace with himself.

I cannot say the book was terrible because I did read it until the end. Grisham’s main problem in Pizza is that he provides great characters and interesting story background, but the story doesn’t have the traditional and necessary plot arc.

There is no real climax or turning point, nothing to make the reader want to know more.

The only thing I kept reading for was to see if the Parma Panthers ever won the Italian Superbowl.

Grisham has come up with an interesting background for a great story, but the great story never comes.

If I was an aspiring novelist, I would actually be kind of irritated with this novel because I really believe that if Grisham did not already have a successful background no publisher would have published this.

Considering A Time to Kill (a great story) was initially slated for only 5,000 copies, it is ridiculous that this extremely inferior work was automatically expected to be a top-seller just because of the author’s reputation.

It’s the same with movies, just because Meryl Streep has had 14 Oscar nominations, it doesn’t mean Prime is a great movie.

Basically, Playing for Pizza is like a B-movie of books, it would be suitable as an airplane read or something to put you to sleep, but it isn’t something you would be dying to read.

If you like Grisham’s other work, don’t get to discouraged, his latest book, The Appeal, returns to his legal strengths and promises to provide a much more intriguing storyline.