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The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Stephen King
Simon and Schuster, $16.95

Reviewed by Derek Catsam
SportsJones Magazine
July 5, 1999

Stephen King is a native New Englander, and a lifelong fan of the star-crossed Boston Red Sox. Considering that the Red Sox have a stomach-turning, white-knuckle-inducing, horror-show history, it was only apropos that King finally get around to writing on the Sox.

Consider what has happened since "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" hit the shelves: soon after the book’s April release, Sox pitcher Tom Gordon went on the 15-day disabled list with a bum elbow. He returned and seemed as good as new, until his consecutive save streak – a major league record – was ended in the most horrible fashion, with two outs in the ninth, in Fenway, at the hands of the Sox historical rival, the Atlanta (formerly Boston) Braves. Then he went down to injury again, and this time it looks as if he might need surgery.

Then, news comes through that King himself has fallen to the curse of the Bambino: last month, while strolling down the street in his pastoral hometown of Lewiston, Maine, King was hit by a runaway Dodge Caravan. (Will there be a sequel to "Misery"?) His spirits seem intact, but he remains in the hospital with broken bones and a punctured lung. Clearly some subjects carry too much supernatural power to be tampered with. One of these is the Red Sox.

King is no nouveau Sox fan. He writes about them frequently, and his homely mug can often be seen at Fenway Park. Rumor has it that upon waking after surgery, King asked about the Red Sox. He has said before that the ultimate horror show involving the Sox will come if they ever play against the equally stricken Chicago Cubs in a World Series, which will remain forever tied at three games to three, with some natural disaster preventing either from emerging victorious.

Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, King chose to use the Red Sox's ace reliever Tom "Flash" Gordon as his hook into the supernatural in his latest novel. The girl of the title is nine-year old Trisha McFarland, whose mother has taken Trisha and her brother on a hiking trip on the northern end of the Appalachian Trail. The brother and the mom bicker about her divorce from the children's father, and to escape the squabble Trisha goes off the side of the trail. Predictably, she gets hopelessly and frightfully lost.

The book's plot centers around Trisha's desperate struggle to survive as she gets ever further mired in the depths of the dense, dank, and foreboding wilderness of western Maine and eastern New Hampshire. On her amazing Walkman, she can capture signals from the various stations that carry Red Sox games, and one of the things that keeps her sane is hearing about her favorite player, number 36, Tom Gordon, on whom she has something of a preadolescent crush.

As the days pass and her food supplies dwindle, Trisha relies more and more upon an innate survival instinct coupled with her growing dementia, which has her occasionally seeing Gordon, who appears to instruct, guide, and encourage her. King is pretty heavy-handed with the metaphor of Gordon-as-religious-figure. After each of Gordon's saves, he points at the sky to give thanks to the Lord, and King takes off from this image to explore the various manifestations of faith.

Though King’s protagonist doesn't buy into this faith (because of her father's beer-drenched reflections on the subject), her preternatural belief in Gordon as a mythic figure carries her through. In the woods she wears a replica Gordon jersey and a hat that Flash signed in Fenway the previous season; these quasi-religious totems coupled with Gordon's ghostly presence seem to serve as King's way of exploring how humans react with superstition in times of extreme duress.

It had been years since I'd read anything King has written, but this book is typical of what I recall of his works. His prose is straightforward and goes down easily. The book's chapters, somewhat affectedly, are numbered according to innings; occasionally King will break an inning into halves. The baseball imagery is pervasive, suiting King's parable, albeit at times gratuitously so. The book reads quickly, and is appropriate for the beach or the airplane.

Maybe someday King will write a book with the Red Sox fully at the center of it. However, I dread the injuries, losing streaks, and other swarms of locusts that such a project would bring about, given the horrible luck visited upon King and my team after this breezy and fun but unsatisfying and minor dalliance with Soxiana.

Though he suffers for Boston, Derek Catsam finds himself in Ohio, where he is working on his Ph.D. in history.

http://www.sportsjones.com/gordon.htm