Propelled by lyrical prose that flouts the conventions of grammar and style, it’s a sports novel that’s also a thriller and an existential horror story, though it doesn’t blend genres so much as cycle through them in succession...The results are disorienting, and often thrilling...This style of impressionistic prose doesn’t illuminate Nineteen’s inner life so much as offer a sense of what it feels like at the center of the huddle...Compounding Nineteen’s sizable array of problems, his football days have left him with 'yellow patches of dead and dying tissue where blood vessels had bruised themselves against the brain case'...In layman’s terms, he’s got CTE, the neurodegenerative disease that afflicts NFL players at an alarmingly high rate...Marten’s a gifted stylist, and if anything holds Pure Life together, it’s his consistently exciting prose...And while at times I wondered if the book might benefit from a heavier editorial hand, I’m ultimately convinced that—as in the cases of Poe, Melville, and James, not to mention Woolf, Bellow, and Faulkner—its nebulous shape affords Marten the room to rev up to rhapsodic peaks.
Pure Life opens with a history of sorts, prefacing Nineteen’s life to this point...After a decent career as a quarterback for an unnamed NFL team (though many real-life teams and players are named), he’s accumulated what many Americans would think of as the trappings of success, alongside some serious brain trauma...The money quickly fades, but unfortunately, the scars never do...The abuse incurred over years of professional play has more than taken its toll, and slowly sends Nineteen into a spiral he is powerless to escape...The novel follows every sad step as he loses his wife and family, and the trappings of wealth fall away...Pure Life is a compelling trip into the heart of darkness, but the journey is marred by its meandering pace...Marten has a rare ability to cut to the bone—which leads to some stunning passages, evocative of Cormac McCarthy with more punctuation—but these moments are buried in backstory or entire sections that feel adrift...It’s a sobering journey, but one I’m not sure is worth taking.
Marten delivers a relentless and vivid story of a retired football player who has gladly sacrificed his mind and body to the sport...In an engrossing impressionist rush, Marten chronicles Nineteen’s high school, college, and professional career with 'The Only Team That Matters,' brilliantly capturing the 'Dadaist poetry' of play calls, the blur of moving bodies, and the numbing catalog of injuries...The adventure produces memorable scenes and suspense, but its lurid, action movie qualities jar with Marten’s intense psychological portrait of a fallen idol...Messy and fascinating, this blitzes the reader with a disorienting stream of language and genres.
