Ross Raisin’s exceptional new novel addresses and overturns these preconceptions and conventional notions of masculinity in the most unexpected and sophisticated fashion. And, as with most sports novels, it’s not really about sport. It’s about ambition, friendship, rivalry, talent, and how early potential always meets the implacable wall of adult reality. Also, it’s about the love that still dare not speak its name ... Raisin adumbrates Tom’s sexual awakening as sensitively as Alan Hollinghurst, as lubriciously as Edmund White. Not since Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain has there been a better portrayal of a conflicted male sexuality ... Raisin forcefully explores notions of normative masculinity, without censure or preaching ... the book presents a brave and subtle portrait of a soul in torment. It’s a winner.

This is a bold novel, one that confronts and inhabits a distinctly British masculine unease ... A Natural is overtly concerned with shame. It picks at the conflict between socially conditioned masculinity and gay desire. As is noticeable in the sex scenes between Tom and Liam, this is a space in which pleasure is seemingly impossible...For about a third of the novel, this feels uncomfortable. Raisin risks diluting queer experience to a washed-out sadness. In emphasizing shame over pleasure, he gave this reader concern that a distinctly heteronormative gaze was being manipulated...As the book progresses, though, Raisin’s careful path through self-imposed pitfalls becomes clear. The way is lit by his keen perceptions; the novel suggests the frustrations that arise when lived experience fails to align with what was imagined, and analyzes the gap between spectatorship and participation ... What enables Raisin to navigate such fraught terrain is his deep and unwavering empathy for others, and an ability to find flashes of beauty in life’s unforgiving ugliness. His language might be spare, but his turn of phrase is strikingly elegant ... If Raisin has chosen to focus on that which stifles rather than frees us, he has done so to demonstrate precisely why we need all the things that society and circumstance suppress.

Raisin haunts his characters with ghosts of social propriety. They are all troubled by what is expected of them; to be mothers, fathers, breadwinners; nuclear homes emblazoned with the comfort of heterosexuality. What is most gut wrenching about A Natural is Raisin’s 20/20 vision of masculinity’s demands; it represses, contorts and sublimates each challenger. These characters are bottled up with desires outside the social norm and the focus on genital predilection erodes their well-being. Duality is a ferocious thing. Tom struggles with his private versus public self. He is a canon with a wick that burns as quick as it is replaced. Raisin steers a glimmering course with terrific restraint in this novel that, like a soccer field, demands full attention to detail.

A Natural is a slow burn of a book, the novelistic equivalent of an athlete gradually limbering up ... the last third uses strategic strokes of plot—a determinative game, swirling rumors—to apply increasing degrees of pressure to the characters. The results are riveting, full of airlessness and desperation ... Raisin proves a restrained yet imagistic writer, well-suited to describing people who observe rather than participate. His prose, combining a flattened emotional affect with chaotic eruptions of visual description, turns repression into an aesthetic ... A Natural owes something to elegies as well as to sports-tinged coming-of-age novels like A Separate Peace and The Art of Fielding. What it adds to these genres, though, is narration attuned to the kind of coded and private language that LGBTQ people have relied upon for years to seek each other out.

Ross Raisin has done his homework so well that I spent much of the novel wondering which club had let him inside the changing-room for a season ... A Natural is a wonderful documentary, but falls slightly short as a novel ... Tom’s struggle with his sexuality is rendered all the more movingly because he is inarticulate. So is almost everyone else in the book...Raisin has deprived his characters of his own power over words. Their tongue-tied speech often attains a poignant beauty, particularly in a very surprising coming-out scene ... the setting is perfectly worked out, albeit often in too much detail, as if Raisin lost control of his research. But this time the characters are underdeveloped. Even Tom always remains slightly out of focus. A Natural works best not as a work of fiction but as a stunning anthropology of professional football.

As Tom tries to prove himself professionally, and the team rebounds from a terrible season to a strong one, Raisin depicts their world with astonishing clarity ... The book is utterly contemporary—players scan online forums for gossip and cocoon themselves with electronics during long bus rides—yet the stifling pressure of the men to hide their relationship, and the locker-room and fan hazing, suggest the mid-twentieth century. (Leave it to sports to turn back the clock on social issues.) While many references and assumptions will be more familiar to British than American readers and soccer fans, Raisin’s transporting and acutely observed novel speaks to us all. First-rate.

The focus is largely on Tom and Liam's affair, which is rendered with restraint and sympathy; it's a bold theme, since not a single active British footballer has come out so far. For a while, though, it is Leah’s story that seems to engage Raisin more, with its telling domestic details and an isolation for which there is no prospect of the numbing distraction in the next match. Yet neither of these parallel narratives generates much spark until a link between them and a leak to an internet fan forum stirs devastating fears in Tom and reveals the mindless prejudice and cruelty of his fellow players and fans. This is a sensitive treatment of very different kinds of solitude and pain.

Most of the narrative bounces back and forth between Tom and Easter’s wife, Leah, a young mother painfully alone in her marriage. The author skillfully interweaves both characters’ feelings of isolation, setting up a number of strong reveals with impressive restraint and control ... The resolution of both stories is suitably heartbreaking, but the implications resolve themselves too quickly in a rushed ending that feels out of place in a novel whose power resides in authorial deliberateness. Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile sports novel with winning characters.