(Once or twice a week, I take a new book with me to lunch and give it a half an hour or so to grab my attention. Lunch Date is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.)
Who's your date today? The Dart League King, by Keith Lee Morris.
Where'd you go? Fire Grill Portuguese B.B.Q., in the old Magic Dragon space on Broadway.
What'd you eat? I ordered the ribs 'n chicken combo, but they were cooking more chicken because it had sold out. Instead, I had the steak sandwich combo, which comes with fries and is only four goddamned dollars!
How was the food? I really liked it. It was a pretty big sandwich, and Portuguese BBQ is sweet and tangy. This wasn't some out-of-a-vat-on-a-heating table barbecue. It was spicy and juicy and just right. The restaurant itself is of course not much to look at—a mall food court would be more appetizing, frankly—but the counter people are nice and the food is really quite good. The fries were your standard, crinkle-cut frozen and deep fried side, but there were three different sauces to dip them in, which is all it takes for me to be happy with lunchtime fries. And it was only four fucking dollars!
What does your date say about itself? It's a novel about a coke-addicted member of a dart league in a small town in Idaho. Booklist says it's "[A] sensitive, cleverly constructed novel of small-town life and big-league dreams....[A] subtle, near flawless portrait of the unique ways that small-town life can both nurture and suffocate its residents."
Is there a representative quote? Try the first two paragraphs: "Tonight was Thursday, and Thursday night meant dart league, and Russell Harmon was the Dart League King. For that reason, and for others, Thursday night was Russell's favorite time of the week. his least favorite time of the week was Friday morning, when he would have to step down from his role as founder/commissioner/team captain/individual champion two years running of the Garnet Lake Dart League and resume his job on a logging crew, a type of work for which he was unenthusiastic and ill-suited. But this was Thursday night, not Friday morning, and in just a couple of hours dart night would be in full swing, and the thing for Russell Harmon to do now was to lay out a few lines of coke for himself and his boss/best friend Matt down in his mother's basement, where he'd been living for almost a year now, as a kind of preparation for and celebration of another excellent evening of darts and various related activities."
Will you two end up in bed together? Yes. My big worry with this sort of small-town story is that the author can often treat his characters as less than human. You can't tell from the above quote, but Morris seems to be able to make the case for these characters being rounded people who do awful things but aren't some sort of namby-pamby author's idea of red state inbreds. Plus, the second chapter is titled "Jack the Fucking Dude." Sold!
