The Bookworm: Friday Night Lights

Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger. 378 pages. HarperPerennial. 1990.

Across the country there were thousands of places just like it, places that were not only isolated but insulated, places that had gone through the growing pains of America without anyone paying attention, places that existed as islands unto themselves with no link to the great cities except that they all sang the same national anthem to the same flag at sporting events. They were the kind of places that you saw from a plane on a clear night if you happened to look out the window, a concentration of little beaded dots breaking up the empty landscape with several veins leading in and out, and then bleak emptiness once again.

I did it — obviously: I finished Friday Night Lights with time to spare. It took an epic effort; today and last Sunday I read about 110 pages. That seems like a lot, but it was almost effortless given how engrossing the book is.

I bought this copy at the new Haunted Bookshop in IC for $4.25. (For those of you who don’t buy used books, I say: even though the older, yellower copy may not have a flashier cover, and may be a little dog-eared, it’s the same book with the same words — and cheaper.) A friend of mine read it in a high school composition class and highly recommended it, but I passed it off as jock lit.

That was pretentious as hell.

Over the years, my curiosity about FNL grew as I fell deeper in love with narrative nonfiction/journalism. Unconsciously, it seems, I’m trying to collect as much of the genre as I can. It’s my addiction — my crack — and from what I read about FNL I knew it would satisfy my fix. I wasn’t disappointed: it was goooooood shit.

Taking a leave of absence from his job on the Philadelphia Inquirer, Bissinger moved his family to Odessa, Texas and spent the late summer and fall of 1988 — and beyond — following the town’s beloved high school football team. But the book isn’t all about football, which is what I ignorantly assumed back in the day. Even though everything in FNL revolves around football, Bissinger uses the sport to spotlight the hidden depths of Odessa, outlining its history, social mores, and backward beliefs. His in-depth reporting exposed the horrendous racism still prevalent in West Texas, the cost of Odessa’s football fanaticism on its education system, and the physical and mental toll of the game on its players and fans. Odessa, with all its positives and negatives, was transformed into a microcosm of American society. In the acknowledgments, Bissinger thanked his editor by saying she “aided me immeasurably in the painful process of trying to organize all these swirling thoughts about Odessa and high school football and American life into something coherent.”

FNL is more than coherent. The writing is clear, concise, and brilliant. The crafting is top notch. The flow of the prose is most uninterrupted. Bissinger smoothly segues from one subject or scene to another. A good analogy for it is “beat matching,” which house and trance DJs use to fluidly transition from one track to another without breaking the rhythm; when done correctly, you hardly notice the change.

New words I learned: All definitions courtesy of my MacBook dictionary. Sidelight: “a light placed at the side of something; figurative: a piece of incidental information that helps to clarify or enliven a subject.” Maw: “the jaws or throat of a voracious animal.” Insouciance: “casual lack of concern; indifference.” Panacea: “a solution or remedy for all difficulties or diseases.” Sacrosanct: “(esp. of a principle, place, or routine) regarded as too important or valuable to be interfered with.” Mercuric: “of mercury with a valence of.” Flagellate: “flog (someone), either as a religious discipline or for sexual gratification.” Metonymy: “the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example suit for business executive, or the track for horse racing..” Skein: “a tangled or complicated arrangement, state, or situation.” Vacillate: “alternate or waver between different opinions or actions; be indecisive.”