The Season: A Fan’s Story

Garner (Everywhere I Look) reflects on masculinity and the passage of time in this tender if somewhat opaque chronicle of the season she spent watching her grandson play Australian football. Feeling adrift in her writing, Garner asked her 15-year-old grandson Amby if she could accompany him to his practices. Amby had been playing “footy” since he was a “tubby little eight-year-old” but had since grown into a six-foot tall, broad-shouldered young man. “All my life I’ve fought men, lived under their regimes,” Garner writes, but the experience of becoming a grandmother to boys helped her “see their delicacy, their fragility.” With a notebook in hand, Garner hovers at a distance from the on-field action, capturing Amby’s physical prowess with wonder even as the “nana” in her struggles to tamp down her fear of injury. She tinges the memoir with a hint of sadness, aware, at 80, that as her grandchildren blossom, time is exerting the opposite effect on her. Interspersed throughout are accounts of Garner watching Australian football on TV, which lack the emotional heft of the other chapters. Furthermore, American readers unfamiliar with the sport are left to tread water. It adds up to a moving but uneven reading experience. Agent: David Forrer, InkWell Management. (Sept.)