The Barfighter is a book I received for review from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, quite a while ago. I'm miserably behind on my reviews from LT, which probably explains why they haven't given me any books in the last several months. I'm trying to get caught up as quickly as I can, but there are just too many books out there, calling my name!

The Barfighter switches between 1965 and 1985. Our main character is Lee Cheskis, who started out as an Army boxer during the Vietnam War. Boxing for the Army was a way for men who had the talent to avoid being shipped overseas. Lee had the talent. Fast forward to the 80's, and Lee is in anger management, drifting through life, working part-time at the local college to pay the rent. He meets Marvin O'Brien in anger management and, when the boy shows promise as a fighter, decides to become O'Brien's manager to try to make a pro out of him.

Boxing is not my thing. I don't like it, I don't watch or follow it in any way, I basically, like Lee's girlfriend Lorraine, think it's a brutal sport. I don't see the point in putting two men in a ring to beat the shit out of each other and see who falls down first. So I'm not sure what prompted me to select this book for review. Maybe the Vietnam War aspect. I've always been interested in that conflict, but, unfortunately, Lee never even sees Vietnam.

This book is dude lit, if there is such a thing. We women have both chick lit and women's fiction (which I see as two different things, one being lighter and "fluffier" than the other, but both focusing on women and their relationships, usually with other women). This book does the same for men...focuses on their relationships, especially how Lee interacts with his fighter, his former sparring partner during the war, the promoters, trainers and managers he works with and comes across in his work, even random men he beats in bar fights.

The book is largely written from Lee's point of view, however there are brief instances when the point of view (although third person omniscient) switches to Valaitas, Lee's commanding officer during the war and a fellow trainer afterwards, and, at the end, to Quick O'Brien's, Lee's fighter. These switches in point of view were a bit confusing. We're used to seeing Lee's perspective and, when the POV shifted, I had to keep checking back to see if it were Lee or Valaitas who was thinking and doing these things. At the end, when the POV switched to O'Brien, I was puzzled. We'd never seen things from his perspective at all during the course of the novel, so why did it end with him? I have some ideas about that, which involve spoilers, so I don't want to get into them here, but ultimately, I didn't like the POV switch. We didn't know enough about either Valaitas or O'Brien for them to work for me as the main POV. And the ending, from O'Brien's POV, was rather abrupt. I wanted it to be tied up a little more neatly, but that's life I guess.

Overall, the book was good. Three out of five Whatevers. Someone who enjoys boxing more than I do would probably REALLY enjoy the book. There were quite a few typos for my taste, but I have a bound galley, so I'm hoping those were fixed by the time the book went to press. The book would be great for boxing enthusiasts, reluctant readers of the male persuasion, maybe even as a Christmas gift for Dad or an uncle who remember the golden days of boxing. ( )

Lee Cheskis, the protagonist of Ivan Goldman's 'The Barfighter,' would fit well in a pulpy hard-boiled detective novel. He's help back by the ghosts of his past, longing for the gal that got away, and gets himself into sticky situations because of his inability to avoid danger.

Cheskis is a pretty captivating character, especially since Goldman's story is set in the mid-'80s boxing culture. Using his experience with the sport, Lee helps a colleague in his anger management class begin an amateur boxing career. Things get bumpy from there.

While the novel is ham-fisted at times, Goldman keeps the narrative trotting along. He uses a liberal amount of simile, almost rivaling Chandler at times, and it comes off pretty well. I was surprised at how interested in and concerned for Cheskis I had become, even when the novel sagged a bit. And the ending? Fantastic. ( )

“Barfighters were a minority species in Cheskis’s anger management class. Rather than fight each other, most violent men find it safer and more gratifying to assault their wives and children.”

Now that is a great way to begin a book and it was glancing at those first two sentences that finally persuaded me to put aside my prejudices (Do I really want to read a book about a bunch of idiots beating each other up?), prejudices that had kept this novel loitering about my shelves like a bruiser up a back alley for an unconscionably long time.

Set in the sleazy world of the LA fight scene, The Barfighter tells the tale of an intelligent, sensitive man haunted by guilt about a betrayal that apparently saved his skin at the cost of his best friend’s. Persuaded he is damned, Lee Cheskis quits a good job, a good wife, and a good life, and sinks into a sordid round of brawling, boozing, and patchwork employment in an attempt to lose himself and his own self-loathing in the seamy underside of the sport that triggered his act of treachery. Instead, he finds himself and something approaching a precarious kind of redemption.

Sleazy? Sordid? Seamy?

Do I really want to read a book about a bunch of idiots beating each other up?

Yes, you do.

This is a book about boxing for people who find boxing baffling, but one that won’t fail to stir fight fans, too. Like a great populist storyteller, Goldman takes us into a world most of us are never likely to know and explains precisely how it works, except that the small time losers and big time grifters portrayed here are a hell of a lot more interesting than the legal apparatchiks and other assorted rich people who normally litter up the bestseller list.

Better still, Goldman can write. The overall tone is hard-boiled with a liberal conscience and, like most hard-boiled voices, it’s the voice of a romantic confronted with a world that is not manifestly kind to romantics. Personally, I gave up on hard-boiled about a decade ago when its most celebrated contemporary exponents seemed to degenerate into windy egoism, but Goldman revives my faith.

He is good on boxing banter, great on repartee (there are some lovely one-liners), less good on discursive philosophical dialogue. But then he’s not writing about philosophers. He’s writing about fighters and fighting, something that he does superbly. The big set piece boxing matches pull you in like a whirlpool, even when you come from a place of total ignorance. And by God, you want the goodies to win, too, despite the fact that Goldman makes it painfully clear that there are precious few winners in boxing and that, when it happens, winning is generally compromised and always ephemeral. He also does a lovely line in satirizing the mores of TV-land, and engineers a generous, if slightly self-indulgent, cameo appearance for Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady.

Perhaps his greatest trick is making the reader care about people who are superficially so terrifying that the prospect of meeting them in ordinary circumstances would be enough to recommend relocating to a different hemisphere. The transformation of the principal professional fighter from a resentful street kid into a heart warming human being is particularly well done, lightly sketched but effective, subtle but powerful. He also contrives to put Cheskis into situations that are either patently dumb (unprovoked barroom brawls) or utterly appalling (the scene in the holding pen of the county jail, standing his ground against a collection of homicidal maniacs who don’t like white college professors, will remain with me for a long time) without giving any sense of macho braggadocio.

In some ways, The Barfighter is a small story, but it is immaculately plotted and manages to say a lot of big stuff along the way, neatly exploiting –without becoming ponderous– the metaphorical potential of a predatory world in which a few fat cats feed off the blood and sweat of individuals who are often nasty but, in their own broken way, always heroic.

I’ve never read a boxing book before –or better a book set in the boxing world– so inevitably it’s films that come to mind for comparisons . . . Somebody Up There Likes Me, Rocky, Raging Bull. For authenticity and seriousness of intent, The Barfighter is nearer Raging Bull than any other boxing film I know, but oddly enough it was a different cinematic image that came to mind when I was reading the book, one that pitched it halfway between Rocky and (not Somebody Up There Likes Me, but another Paul Newman film) Cool Hand Luke.

I’ve virtually no recollection of Rocky apart from a sort of deranged exultancy during what I would guess was the climactic fight sequence, but I felt something of that reading The Barfighter, only here it was better because the experience seemed real and expressed more than the mere victory of a Hollywood underdog. As for Cool Hand Luke, the scene I found myself thinking of was not the one when George Kennedy beats Newman to a pulp, but the one with the eggs. The act of eating fifty boiled eggs is lunatic, but our man turns it into a triumph of the human will that ends with that beatific smile. Same here. People are beating each other up, which is just plain daft, yet the way Goldman presents it, you suddenly understand that old saw about ‘the noble art’.

For the most part, The Barfighter explores experiences that most sane people would make strenuous efforts to avoid, but when someone elicits the attendant emotions, life seems a little larger, a little wider, a little louder, and you go away grateful that Goldman has taken you into his world.

Do I really want to read about a bunch of idiots beating each other up? Yes, they’re not idiots and there is something rather more sublime going on here than simply beating each other up.

Although I am somewhat of a boxing fan, I didn't love this book. I think my husband would actually enjoy it more than I did. I'll see if he'll read it and I'll post his review as an edit to this one. Stay tuned! ( )

A very interesting tale of a boxer. Even though I am not a fan of boxing, I found this book to be a pleasant read. ( )