Winners

by Eric B. Martin
MacAdam/Cage, March 2005
361 pp.


Chimney sweep Shane McCarthy has three great loves in life: a whip-smart wife named Lou, pick-up basketball, and booming hometown San Francisco. While Lou hunts easy millions at the height of the dot-com frenzy, Shane fills his extra hours searching for a troubled player from his weekly hoops game – a 20-year-old named Samson who’s disappeared, leaving only a bulging duffel bag behind. Following a trail that winds through Pacific Heights parties and the projects, Shane unravels a mystery that links his wife’s new world to missing Samson and his family.

Evoking the glitter of The Great Gatsby and the pulsing streets of Clockers, Winners is both a chronicle of a surreal historic moment and a gripping portrait of a man caught between two worlds. A novel of startling scope and ambition, Winners reaches into the hearts and minds of would-be millionaires and ghetto toughs, businesswomen and single moms, gym-rat monguls and pissed-off slackers, all grasping for the gold ring of something better.

Reviews:
From Publishers Weekly
Shane McCarthy is a Berkeley-educated chimney sweep, plying his trade in the mercurial atmosphere of dot-com bubble San Francisco circa 1999. His wife, Lou, glides in and out, obsessed with making her own start-up fortune. Outside of home and work, Shane’s life revolves around basketball games at the Firehouse, an asphalt refuge where he plays the game with other 30-somethings, reveling in the physicality of crashing bodies. When Sam, a 20-year-old who has penetrated this sanctum of men fighting early middle age, disappears from the weekly games, Shane decides to search for him. The hunt begins to fill the gaping void in Shane’s daily existence; sandwiched between the encroaching nouveaux riches as they transform his beloved city into a luxurious playground and his ambitious, distant wife, he ventures into a gritty, other San Francisco. Here he meets Sam’s mother, Debra, tough and tortured and lost in the vortex of violence that plagues her inner-city neighborhood. The two slowly feint and jab at one another, trying to gain trust and information. A puzzling interruption arrives in the person of an enigmatic venture capitalist acquaintance of Lou’s who latches onto Shane and drags him out for a night of slumming, but fortunately his presence causes only minor confusion. Martin’s novel is a well-crafted, unsentimental examination of loneliness and the lengths to which some people will go in order to connect with another human being.
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Kirkus Reviews
Swift-moving tale about basketball, murder and the internet on the mean streets of San Francisco.

Second-novelist Martin (Luck, 2000) gives his protagonist Shane McCarthy, an unusual occupation: he’s a chimneysweep. “Most of Shane’s clients,” Martin writes, “have never looked inside their chimney before... but once he shows them... [They] realize that’s where secrets live, in the trunk of the house, where you can count the rings and read history aloud. If you speak chimney.” All this nicely foreshadows the seamy story that emerges: As San Francisco of 1999 booms with dot-com money, and working-class neighborhoods become yuppie enclaves, Shane, and aging backetball addict who can’t seem to stop breaking his foot, finds himself in a middle of a grimy mystery: a mixed-raced, young, gay teammate has gone missing, leaving a clue-stuffed duffel bag, and Shane decides it’s his job to find the kid. He’s got time for the quest, since his wife, one of the dot-commers, is chasing after the big bucks, and is never around to supervise him. Powerless and alone in a rapidly remade city full of newcomers, Shane keeps at the effort, going deeper and deeper. His search for the elusive boy who goes by many names takes him into tough territory and introduces him to people whose existence he barely knew before, to the secret inside of San Francisco’s chimneys. Basketball keeps him a little sane – a game that goes on, he reflects, while love and lives come and go. Yet, in the end, the quest costs him almost more than he can bear to pay, even as the get-rich-quick city smacks up against a dead end and becomes “a very different place... crowded with failing falling stars, companies winking out one by one, their web sites going dark.”

Expertly written, just the right blend of existencial mystery with hoop dreams, and plenty of middle-aged angst to spare.


Praise for Eric B. Martin and Luck
“An impressive story of love and of the struggle for social justice.”
--J. M. Coetzee

“A wonderful first novel... Told with originality, a marvelous style and a generous spirit.”
--Boston Herald

“Lyrical and rhythmic and here and there as much like music as prose... A natural born stotyteller.”
--Alec Wilkinson

About the author:
Eric Martin grew up in Maine, studied in North Carolina and Texas, and lives in San Francisco. His first novel, Luck, was published in 2000. He is currently working on a third novel.