By Kendra Hibbert
September 5, 2003
In this, my first week back from the First Annual Forest of Dead Trees Retro Summer Sci-Fi Festival, I will be looking at a bizarre life-stranger-than-fiction turn of events that has made me once again scratch my head and wonder at what possible wacky future offerings reality might have in store for pop-culture. In one of those ‘if you had told me five years ago…’ scenarios, former WWF Heavyweight Champion and madman in the ring Mick Foley now has a promising literary career ahead of him with his recently published work of fiction TIETAM BROWN (and oh, how I would have loved to have been at the book launch party for that one). Though Foley has penned previous books his former forays into literature consisted of his autobiography HAVE A NICE DAY and two children’s books – MICK FOLEY’S CHRISTMAS CHAOS (illustrated by Jerry Lawler) and the follow up HALLOWEEN HIJINX. This new book however, is a serious attempt to wrestle (so to speak) with some serious dramatic issues in the genre of adult fiction.
The book follows the coming-of-age adventures of Antietam Brown the Fifth, also called Andy Brown, whose life changes the last day of his stint in reform school at the age of 16 when he is picked up by his previously absent birth father Antietam the Forth (the titular Tietam Brown).
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Andy is in love with a young, popular cheerleader Terri who is inexplicably also in love with him - inexplicably because Andy has never run with the popular crowd being self-conscious and shy and also missing one ear and the feeling in one arm (the result of a car accident which we learn about later in the book). Although Andy has to work up enough courage to even kiss his girlfriend, his Father has absolutely no qualms about loudly copulating with the many lonely, horny (mostly married) women he effortlessly picks up and takes home. Andy, who has spent most of his life fatherless, gets used to the paternal crude advice he hears from Tietam about such topics as how to pick up women and how to make any woman your slave for life. In fact Andy very soon starts to like his Father, though thankfully our young protagonist has more sense than to treat sweet angelic Teri as a sex object. Young love blossoms as does grown-up love when his Father meets a sweet mother figure whose unfortunate past comes back to haunt her just as Andy is getting used to having a family again. All hell breaks loose when his Father’s dark nature surfaces which leads Andy to dig deep into Tietam’s past and uncover some sinister secrets in his history.
Anyone who has read Foley’s Autobiography HAVE A NICE DAY or knows anything about the Mankind Who Would Be King of the Ring will recognize a few familiar details in this book which relate to Foley’s life. Like, for example, the repeated references to steroids (specifically the dangers of it), a brief history lesson in wrestling that plays an important roll in the book and, of course, the fact that Andy is missing one ear (Foley himself lost his in a wrestling match). There’s nothing really wrong with that - as the old writing adage says “write what you know”. Unfortunately, a consequence of his former wrestling career also means he has a tendency to divide his characters into good camps and evil camps as if in every conflict there must be the good guy ‘Babyface’ (in wrestling terms) and the nefarious black hatted villain who enters a room with ominous music. It may work in the morality play that is professional wrestling but when writing a dramatic book like this one, characters do better if they’re painted with shades of grey rather than black and white.
However, Foley’s years of gaining a wrestling audience’s sympathy with his underdog characters does work to his advantage in this book. Andy Brown is like an amalgamation of all of Mick Foley’s alter egos in the world of wrestling (minus perhaps Mr. Socko). A one-eared shy kid who just got out of reform school has about as much chance getting a high-school cheerleader as a one-eared, overweight, insane wrestler with a Leatherface mask has of winning the WWF Heavyweight Championship. Mick Foley, however, knows the crowd loves an underdog – he knew it in the ring and he sure knows it in this book. Andy Brown is everything you could ever want in a protagonist – shy, beaten, moral and misunderstood with a touch of wildman in him. Without such understanding of what it takes to make a great hero, Foley’s first foray into the world of fiction would have fallen flat on its face.
There is, however, a point in which a writer can cross the line from making his character sympathetic to making him pathetic – a victim you cease to feel sorry for because you get tired of hearing his sob stories. Foley crosses this line in TIETAM BROWN – fortunately he crosses it late in the book at a point in which the audience has so much invested in the story and the characters the desire to find out their fate is stronger than the desire to write this book off as a crazy attempt by a former wrestler to make it with the ‘legitimate’ world. Around midway through the novel Foley gets into some of the more unsettling aspects of the history of both Andy Brown and his Father and one disturbing theme keeps popping up - sexual abuse in all its various forms – be it rape or child molestation, forceful sodomy etc.. A book this size (247 pages) can handle one instance of sexual abuse, maybe even two but five (and that’s not including the various promiscuous activities Andy’s Father alludes to) is too much. Rather than sympathise with the main character who has been through so many of these episodes, an audience is more likely to scratch their head in wonderment at what possessed the writer to come back to this subject again and again and again. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not attempting any kind of First Year psychology analysis on Mr. Foley, but I am a little perplexed at this last minute descent into Dante’s Second Layer of Hell (see Dante’s INFERNO). Perhaps again, given his former occupation, Foley had a difficult time understanding that a little subtlety goes a long way.
Nevertheless TIETAM BROWN is a good book – a lot better than some of the works I’ve read from first time novelists and certainly more insightful and passionate than the new books by tired and uninspired high-priced novelists like Clancy and King. If you were to pick up TIETAM BROWN at the bookstore knowing nothing of its author and his habits of talking through a sock puppet there is still enough substance and style, truth and emotion in this book to make it readable and enjoyable and touching. It’s a raw work of fiction but not one lacking style or structure such that you might see other celebrities from the entertainment world come out with. Kudos to Mr. Foley and his publisher for wanting something greater than a novelty work of fiction. Though it isn’t the greatest novel ever written or even the greatest novel written this year there is a lot of merit to Mick Foley’s writing and surprisingly a lot of potential for him as a writer. I’m hoping he continues with this career path - provided he can stay away from the subject of anal rape.
Next Column: I’ll be back to reviewing two novels per column with a couple of writers who once took the publishing world by storm by defining a generation and now are reduced to writing lifeless stories with dull characters (but I’ll be reading their new books anyway) – Douglas Coupland’s HEY NOSTRADAMUS!: A NOVEL and Chuck Palahniuk’s DIARY: A NOVEL. Be back in two weeks to see if there is, in fact, anything ‘novel’ about them.
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