(This cookie dedicated to Tyler Green)
“In an otherwise generous review of my most recent novel, Barney’s Version, that appeared in the London Spectator, Francis King had one caveat. Noting the sharpness of protagonist Barney Panofsky’s intelligence and the breadth of his culture, he doubted that he could also be a sports nut. ‘Would such a man, obsessed with ice hockey, be able to pronounce with such authority on topics as diverse as the descriptive passages in the novels of P.D. James, Pygmalion as play, musical, and film, the pornography published by Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press and Dr. Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes?–rather strains credulity.'”
Mordecai Richler, “Writers and Sports”