Most novels make you wait for the inevitable explanation of the title in a miss-it-if-you-blink, blow-your-mind kind of moment. Blind Your Ponies by Stanley Gordon West waited no such time, revealing the meaning of the title in the sadness-packed, depressing, foreshadowing-of-self-loathing beginning that carried through the rest of the novel; well, at least the first 469 pages, which is about all I was able to stand.
Last year my good friend and fellow bibliophile and I decided to play Reading Bingo, in which one square was labeled, "A book a friend RAVES about." Having her - as well as others in my book club - speak its praises, I concluded there was no better book to satisfy that square than Ponies. While that still may be true, I definitely don't share their affinity for this particular work, and will be using it for the 500+ pages square instead.
Since I'm afflicted with the most common, yet most severe, mental illness known today - called Life - I found the immediate beginning of Blind Your Ponies to be an instant turn-off. Not only did my lips physically curl in disgust just looking at the cover - as I now knew what the title meant - but the very thought of reading the book became the last thing I wanted to do behind laundry, watching PBS Kids, or just staring off into space. I didn't even actually finish the book, not being the least bit interested in the assumed climactic ending, something that is supposedly guaranteed in all books. From skimming and reading the few paragraphs I could tolerate, I was able to gather that the ending would have provided little in turning the tide for me on whether or not I felt anything positive towards this book. Generally speaking, the ending lacked any sort of real conclusion beyond the ending of the basketball season.
Reading this novel reminded me of my high school days, only not those spent cheering on the basketball court, but those spent shoveling metaphorical bullshit into my English papers in preparation for blowing the minds of my future college professors. My Junior Year English teacher called me out on it, if only he had been available to West, he could have saved him an entire novel's worth of overly-contrived crap.
Old, hopeless competition - check!
Will-they-or-won't-they romance - check!
Tragic death - check!
Cancer - check!
Rape - check!
West cornered the market on sad story lines, which may have accounted for the unnecessary page-length, and was an excuse for the turgid, overly-dramatic, incredibly unrealistic plot-twists and accompanying metaphors that littered the story like so much garbage along a majestic mountain highway. (See.) About 150-pages in, I found myself confused as to why this book came so highly-recommended. And although it usually takes me about 60-pages to get hooked on a book, I held out Willow-Creekian-style hope and forged ahead.
Close to the halfway point is when I started to vaguely understand - though completely disagree with - why a lot of people would put this book on their Top-Ten list. West narrated the ebb and flow of life as someone who has lived it, but with particular focus on human suffering, even as he attempted to do the exact opposite. Unfortunately his message of "life sucks but there are moments worth celebrating," got lost amongst his obvious unseasoned abilities as a writer. West ended countless sentences with awkward prepositions, used an inordinate and pointless amount of sentence fragments, and let the cart run away with the horse in terms of metaphors. His imagery flowed well, but only in the places you don't want (Tom's horse, anyone?!?); and while the story, about love, life, taking a village, teamwork, and loss, is more than just about basketball, the execution came off more like a Hallmark-movie gone wrong. The only places where West put nose to the grindstone and propelled the story forward were the game scenes - at one point I actually found myself shoveling handfuls of popcorn into my mouth with excitement. But ultimately anything even remotely climactic could be seen a mile away and was met with an inevitable eye-roll and tall glass of wine to accompany the cheese. And after awhile, following the book's general theme of extreme excess, even the game scenes became too much.
My experience with Blind Your Ponies was similar to that of reading Outlander in that I found an uncontrollable desire to mark out every arbitrary sentence and/or word and watch the book magically (and blessedly) shrink by half and become remarkably more interesting. But that would mean I would need to put more focus into this book and I just can't do that; as West reminds us, life is just too short.
I rode off into the sunset on my pony with this book, hopeful for it's unfolding, but wound up plummeting (albeit slowly and boringly) off the cliff instead.
