John Spurling
Last Updated on June 7, 2022, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 169
I enjoyed The Dream Team so much that I didn't care whether it was naturalistic or not. Although it's a first novel, its author, Joe McGinniss, is already well-known for his The Selling of the President and he has disarmingly made the novel's hero/narrator a best-selling author…. Joe McGinniss tells his story nimbly—the matter is light and he keeps the tone light—but it is above all, perhaps, an excuse to communicate his enthusiasm for horse-racing and as such, in the end, almost more of a rhapsody than a farce. Certainly the most memorable scene is that in which the radio interviewer covers the floor of his hotel room with charts of racing form and goes to work with slide-rule and note-books, making allowance even for the weather. His comic obsession, the result of which in the story is only to make the narrator lose still more money, is also the motive force of the novel.
John Spurling, "Against Nature," in New Statesman, Vol. 85, No. 2202, June 1, 1973, p. 817.∗
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