... magnificent ... Literary and beautiful lines transport readers to the boys’ Southern college, where the football team is no good and no one cares. The Redshirt is a gorgeous novel in which two young men learn who they truly are, with and without the drama of college football.
... eloquent, poignant ... Sobel’s novel is so rich in detail that one doesn’t know whether to place it in the realm of college fiction a la F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe or closer to autofiction like the work of Edouard Louis ... Sobel, who won Duke’s major literary prizes, is a gifted writer with an eye for precise description. One can feel mired in too much detail at times. Moreover, the denouement doesn’t seem totally credible. Wouldn’t an institution like King College give an academic scholarship to a serious student with a 4.0 grade point average and a family with straitened financial circumstances? ... an absorbing portrait of the culture of college athletics as expressed at an institution determined to move from loser to winner at football.
In 2013, University of Missouri defensive end Michael Sam made headlines when he came out as gay. Sam’s teammates were reportedly supportive, and he even ended up being selected in the NFL draft. But for a player to come out amid the macho trappings of big-time football was a big deal, even if other gay players had certainly taken the field without making their sexuality public.The Redshirt, Corey Sobel’s deceptively breezy debut novel about life at an elite, bucolic Southern college, tells the story of one of those other players, the ones who deem it safest to stay in the closet ... Like other great football novels — North Dallas Forty comes to mind — The Redshirt doesn’t flinch from the double-edged sword dangling over the sport’s culture ... I wish there were a little more of The Redshirt, which ends too soon for my taste. The characters and their conflicts are rich enough to warrant further exploration. But this is still a very strong debut novel that draws jagged, vivid links between sport and society.
... incisive, sweeping ... The density of plotlines can be overwhelming, but the author captures Reshawn’s frustration and Miles’s conflicted desires in sharp prose. Sobel’s fervent, literary treatment of sexuality and masculinity perfectly captures the messy world of college sports.
Sobel, who attended Duke on a football scholarship, writes engrossingly about football's punishing physical and psychological rituals. And though his characterizations are solid, too, the book's style and tensions are so straightforward that it reads more like a YA novel. A subplot involving Reshawn’s research on a well-educated freed slave feels forced and underdeveloped, as do Sobel’s late efforts to work in riffs on Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener (The latter trope reinforces the sense that the book is a gridiron reprise of The Art of Fielding.) Still, the core crises that Miles and Reshawn face feel authentic, and Sobel smoothly persuades the reader to witness their many bruises ... A promising debut, albeit with some familiar conflicts.
