St John of the Midfield

As titles and central concepts go, St. John of the Midfield isn’t half bad. The analogy is used to explain what a central midfielder should truly aspire to be – “You make all the right passes. Forward pass. Through pass. Back pass. Only a good person can make those passes”. This is one of a number of little nuggets about playing the game “the right way” that drift through this interesting yet mixed novel by Michigan-based author Garasamo Maccagnone.

The central storyline is of a top-level youth soccer team in the state of Michigan, the Rochester Crusaders, their mysterious, almost monastic Bulgarian coach “Bobo” Stoikov, star player Luca Santini and Luca’s father Mario, the story’s narrator. Luca joins the team at the story’s beginning, as does soccer novice Mario as an assistant coach. Under the tutelage of Stoikov, the team goes from strength to strength, always being pushed to play the beautiful game, on the ground with passing, passing, passing. An exceedingly successful season takes the Crusaders to the state championship against rival club Raiders and their sinister coach Sonny Christopher. The match is an epic triumph for Luca, Stoikov and the Crusaders but the success comes with a cost and fall-out from the victory leads to tragic and unexpected consequences.

Alongside the story of the Crusaders, Maccagnone weaves in a number of other threads. Mario Santini is half-Sicilian and his strained relationship with his father and the underbelly of “the family business” raises difficult questions about family loyalty versus moral conduct. His brief affair with the mother of another player on the team pushes those questions even further. The hyper-competitive world of American youth soccer also goes under the microscope, a world in which the rivalries and jealousies of parents and the egos of coaches and administrators sometimes make the well-being of the kids an afterthought. And then there is the Bulgarian Stoikov, a former Bulgarian national team midfielder whose career came to an end after being terribly injured escaping Communist Bulgaria in hopes of reaching professional soccer in the United States in the late 1970s. He hovers over the other characters in the novel, a doomed genius, his concern seemingly only for the players and for teaching them the beauty and joy the game can bring.

The story of St. John of the Midfield is a good one and the novel ticks along nicely with a good sense of timing, leading us down the occasional side trail for accent but never straying too far from the main plotline. The characters Maccagnone creates are memorable ones, in particular Stoikov and Mario’s father, a hard man prone to flashes of quick violence yet also a loving and doting father and grandfather. – “I loved that moment. For another hour I watched my father, the gangster, pray and meditate on the novenas, his aqua rosary getting lost in his giant hand.” Even some of the minor characters add color, Mario’s nearly-crazy mother always speaking to her Polish ghosts, the fellow father Fred, who never stops bragging about his son, and the (almost too) arch-villain Sonny Christopher.

But the book is not without its flaws and some serious ones at that. Fundamentally I think it is a matter of editing, or the lack of it. Maccagnone, as far as I can tell, has published this himself. I applaud him for that as I know that the choice is often between publishing something yourself and not having it published. But the book could have really used an editor. On a basic level the number of typos, both spelling and grammatical, is almost too much to bear. There’s even a spelling error on the back cover! But beyond these somewhat superficial errors I found much of the dialogue stiff, sometimes painfully so. A fair amount of the phrasing is also very stilted and sometimes makes for difficult reading.

Overall I found the book an interesting and entertaining read. I’m not sure it’s something I’d recommend to everyone but I would certainly recommend Garasamo Maccagnone as an author to keep your eye on. He has a talent for characters and a talent for a story and, with a good editor to improve the mechanics of his writing, I think he could go a long way.

St. John of the Midfield
By Garasamo Maccagnone
169 pages
booksurge.com, 2007