Nobody Roots for Goliath

By Phil Hutcheon

Nobody Roots for Goliath is a comic novel about Marvin Walker, a seven foot six inch, nearly illiterate basketball prodigy and Wade, the depressed, neurotic English Professor who befriends him. Can... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1930008112
• ISBN13: 9781930008113
• Release Date: February 2007
• Publisher: Willowgate Pr
• Length: 203 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Goliath and the English Teacher

Made for the movies, Marvin is two feet taller than his teacher Wade who resembles Paul Giamatti's character in "Sideways" . He is woefully ignorant of grammar and writing --everything connected with college life except basketball. The wry, dry humor of Wade's broken marriage and realistic classroom situations, guns and drugs will keep you laughing. I give the book an A for interracial friendship, aptness of memorable epigrams, and credible, zany overlapping dialogue peppered with Hutcheon's excellent ear for street language. He quotes Willie Mays' s :"I want to say to the kids of America that baseball is a wonderful thing, but the main thing is education." This highly readable book is not for sissies; it's for grown-ups who may be moved emotionally. Rated R for language and explicit sexual scenes which are laughable, -Virginia O'Hagan

Deliciously Naughty

Phil Hutcheon's deliciously naughty Nobody Roots for Goliath is a poignant, erotic, pensive, and hilarious combination of almost unbelievable scenarios tempered with all too relatable interactions. For any who were or are students,Hutcheon's Goliath provides some demoralizing insight into what is really going on in professors heads. For those readers who are professors, I suspect Goliath provides, among other things, a hard-on!

This book is very funny.

Each chapter has epigraphs from literary authors, sports figures, even fictional characters. Example: "Remember, the light at the end of the tunnel could be an oncoming train.--Lou Holtz." There is erudite, sarcastic banter between the main character, Malcolm Wade, ABD, and his brilliant, temporarily slumming academic colleague Angela Hart, Ph.D. A sample: Wade: "If I don't finish by December, I turn back into a pumpkin." Angela: "Don't you mean back into a toad, Wade?" Wade: "Sorry. I'm a little rusty on my transmogrification archetypes." But the funniest aspect of this book is the string of frustrations facing Wade: They range from his ill-chosen thesis advisor, who is more interested in Sherwood Anderson and almost any other author than in Wade's subject, Hemingway, and his English Dept. boss, who uses dorky, dated slang and even attempts a high five with the "Goliath" of the title, 7-foot, 6-inch basketball prodigy Marvin Walker, thru his students, who write about "escape goats" and taking things "for granite" (not to mention his simply awful wife), to all those who would exploit Marvin Walker's $68 million potential. How Wade deals with these frustrations provides the book's basic satisfactions. Suffice it to say here that Marvin and his "god moth" recognize these would-be exploiters as, "That's one evil bitch," and, "this African American Judass."

A Witty and Profane Comedy of Self-Embalming and Awakening

I liked this book a lot. Phil Hutcheon's Nobody Roots for Goliath is both a satire of academic life and a comedy of a self-embalmed 40-year-old emerging from arrested adolescence into greater self-respect and independence. But don't let that stop you. It is also a very funny book. It made me laugh out loud several times. The novel has a wry, disaffected wit that skewers, very entertainingly, many of the absurdities of academic life. The protagonist, Malcolm Wade, drudges ambivalently in what he experiences as the lower rungs of college hell--freshman composition. Wade enlists our sympathy because he has a sense of honor about doing a job he often despises and because he has a crap-detector about the intellectual pretensions of his colleagues and the educational sham going on around him. He even sees that he,too, is implicated in the absurdity. That crap-detector and Wade's (and Hutcheon's) love of language create the comic absurdity that makes the novel so much fun. Wade seems, at times, like a middle-aged Holden Caulfield driven by economic necessity to teach at Pencey Prep, where the phoniness still sandpapers his nerve endings at 40 the way it did at 15. Hutcheon endows Wade with an eagle eye for psycho-babble, educational mumbo-jumbo, and the language of aging self-proclaimed "hipsters". Shy, decent, and un-macho despite his passionate love of sports, Wade is nostalgic for the free-swinging adolescence he never experienced in high-school and college. The comic fantasies and sex romps are both funny and strangely nostalgic--a reliving of adolescent fantasies that didn't come true when Wade thinks they should have. But the really poignant connection in the novel is Wade's relationship with Marvin, a 7" 6' African-American basketball phenom, the college's only hope for athletic glory. Wade evokes in Marvin a desire to learn, and Marvin evokes in Wade a depth of feeling and courage, emotions so deeply buried under cynicism and self-loathing that he has forgotten they exist. The real awakening for Wade is not sexual; it's an awakening of the heart, one that genuinely surprises him. One of the best aspects of the novel is Hutcheon's skillful depiction of Wade's surprise at his growing tenderness and respect for Marvin. The author supplies plenty of plot twists to surprise the reader, as well.

Highly recommended.

Composition teacher and longtime Giants, Warriors, and 49ers fan Phil Hutcheon presents Nobody Roots for Goliath, a realistic novel of contemporary college life. Marvin Walker wants to make the most of his seven-foot, six-inch heigh and prodigious basketball skills to finance a college degree and even win a spot on the NBA. But he enters the academic world woefully underprepared; and an older English instructor named Wade dares to take the young man under his wing and help him build his academic skills. Chronicling the battle against a host of life obstacles from bad grammar, drugs, and crime to paralysis-inducing political correctness, fickle lovers, and domestic violence, Nobody Roots for Goliath is a serious-minded, absorbing novel that reads like a true story because it draws so heavily upon harsh reality. Highly recommended.