Review: Like a Springsteen Song
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 23, 2012
Many writers parachute in for a story and disappear forever as soon as they've cannibalized the lives of their subjects for fame, glory, and profit, if the writers are lucky anyway. It's a little ghoulish. If a writer has at least a shred of conscience, he or she lives with a sense of debts unpaid in the aftermath of a book, particularly a successful one.Buzz Bissinger clearly understands this indebtedness. It appears to have galvanized him into writing the not always so pretty story of his ongoing friendship with Boobie Miles, maybe the most compelling subject of Friday Night Lights, the classic book about a Texas town and its beloved high school football team. While the book made Bissinger into a famous writer, its central protagonist, Miles, has suffered for decades from the failure of his high school dreams of football stardom. He now seems, however, on the verge of accepting a new life that requires a quieter, less noticeable heroism. That is the beautiful revelation of Bissinger's extension of his original story here. In its exalting of starting over again and again, After Friday Night Lights is like a Bruce Springsteen song come to life.