To say that Bill Gaston's The Good Body is hilarious is to miss the profound forest for the mesmerizing trees. Oh, The Good Body will split you with laughter (how could a story of an aging semi-pro hockey player cheating his way into a graduate creative writing program not?), but the comedy is in fact another aspect of the novel's intimate understanding of its characters. It is this closeness that wires The Good Body with an electric psychology alternately hilarious, insightful, affirming, and terrifying.

None of Bob Bonaduce's career of hockey violence prepares him for the crushing blow he receives in a doctor's office after one foot doesn't stop tingling and his hands suddenly go clumsy. Sent into the boards by the body that has given him a career, a broken marriage, and the purest grace he has ever known, Bonaduce decides to reintroduce himself to his estranged son. What better way to do that than to play hockey on the same varsity team? Life on the road has given him plenty of time to read. He's tried some writing. If he needs to be a student to play with his son, isn't creative writing really the thing? Application portfolio? Oh, Bonaduce can get around that defense.

Fellow players, housemates, ex-lovers, and classmates all meet Gaston's unflinching honesty, alternately kissed by sympathy or slashed by damning eyes. With Gaston's uniquely polymorphous talent, humor, insight, sex, and tragedy all are marks of a voice that is so comforting for the wounds it both opens and heals. --Darryl Whetter

From Publishers Weekly
Although a quick synopsis of Canadian writer Gaston's American debut might sound maudlin--a rootless minor-league hockey player contracts multiple sclerosis and goes home to make peace with the family he's neglected for years--the novel itself is not. Told in finely calibrated prose that captures not only the agonizing eloquence of a body betraying its tenant but the rough-edged mumble of a professional athlete's voice, the novel walks a fine line with certainty and grace. Forty-year-old Bobby Bonaduce keeps mum about his illness, deciding not to retire from hockey in the U.S. and return to Fredericton, Canada, hoping to score sympathy points with Leah Miller, the wife he left 10 years before but never divorced, and Jason, his 20-year-old son with whom he exchanges about four letters every two years. Instead, he enrolls as a graduate student in English at the University of New Brunswick in order to play hockey on his son's team. Neither classes nor family reconciliation go as smoothly as Bobby hopes, and the ensuing mix of hilarity and heartbreak gives the book its sweet, gritty signature. The prodigal student rents a room from a group of young students, becoming close friends with one of them--a wry young woman named Margaret--and, in a clever twist, with Oscar, Leah's current lover. Although the narration dips into a few other characters' minds, Bobby is the star of this show; he confronts his dilemmas with the hopefulness of a child and the bravado of an oncoming truck. A seamless tone (one that isn't "afraid to sing it into sweet words"), a cast of warm, genuine characters and a confluence of unlikely but wholly believable events bring this modern hero to life. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
After a long stint as a minor league hockey player, Bobby Bonaduce feels his career is over. Having spent his professional life delivering and receiving hits on and off the ice, Bobby returns home to his collegiate alma mater and to his estranged son and former wife, all of whom were left behind long ago for an unfulfilled promise of NHL glory. Plagiarizing his way into an English Ph.D. program, Bobby hopes to play his final year of college eligibility on the same team as his son, but Bobby has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. As his physical condition worsens, he battles to keep his illness secret and to salvage a relationship with his son. This powerful story of the relationship between "body people" and "head people" calls to mind the work of another Canadian writer, Leonard Cohen. And although the tone may be overly serious, this well-wrought tale is marked by bursts of hilarity and keen insight. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

The Orlando Sentinel
" The Good Body is a witty, heartbreaking and unpredictable tale, whose fictional charcaters seem to breathe on the page..."

Thomas McGuane, author of Nothing but Blue Skies and Ninety-Two in the Shade
"A winning, moving book filled with...achy humanity and rueful, well-earned humor."

Globe and Mail - Toronto
"Gentle, humorous, absurd, beautiful, spiritual, dark and sexy. He deserves to dwell in the company of Findley, Atwood, or Munro."

Denver Post
"Poignant and bittersweet...a testament to [Gaston's] skill as a storyteller...


"Unpredictable, harrowing, and engrossing."

The Denver Post
"Poignant and bittersweet...a testament to (Gaston's) skill as a storyteller..."

Publishers Weekly
"Told in finely calibrated prose...the novel, walks a fine line with certainty and grace...."

Booklist
“Well-wrought tale…marked by bursts of hilarity and keen insight.”

Thomas McGuane, author of Nothing but Blue Skies and Ninety-Two in the Shade
“A winning, moving book filled with achy humanity and rueful, well-earned humor.”

National Post
"A heartbreaking,funny portrayal of a man who has left the rink but is still struggling to play the game."

Book Description
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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

With The Good Body, Bill Gaston emerges as a singular new voice in fiction—an insightful chronicler of the confusions of contemporary manhood. At the novel's center in Bobby "Loose" Bonaduce, a hockey player who left his young family years ago for a professional career. With the prospect of retirement before him, Bobby is compelled to reach out to the son he abandoned, fast-talking his way into a graduate seminar at the school where Jason is an undergrad. But Bobby is also—unbeknownst to his family—struggling with an insidious disease that promises to rob him of the one thing that never let him down: his body. Bobby's attempts to navigate the no-man's-land of his failed marriage, to fashion a rough kind of 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 weaves all these threads into a funny, never sentimental, but deeply moving story that may remind readers of the work of Richard Russo, Frederick Exley, or even the young John Updike.

About the Author:
Bill Gaston is a novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter; he was recently awarded the prestigious Canadian Literary Award for Short Fiction. Gaston lives in Victoria, British Columbia; The Good Body marks his first U.S. publication.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jim Harrison

Unpredictable, harrowing and engrossing.

Thomas McGuane

A winning, moving book filled with achy humanity and rueful, well-earned humor.

Orlando Sentinel

The Good Body is a witty, heartbreaking and unpredictable tale, whose fictional charcaters seem to breathe on the page...

Toronto Globe and Mail

Gentle, humorous, absurd, beautiful, spiritual, dark, and sexy. He deserves to dwell in the company of Findley, Atwood, or Munro.

Cleveland Plain Dealer