train by pete dexter

Monopoly Book Challenge - Reading Railroad - A book with X in the title or author's name.
Guilty Pleasure

The monopoly book challenge for Reading Railroad could be a book with X in the title or author's name OR a book with a train on the cover or about a train. While this book was titled "train", it was in reference to the nickname of a golf caddy, the protagonist of the book. So, even though I already did my X author, I decided to read another X author for this challenge.

This was a fairly fast moving novel. I really liked the protagonist Train and appreciated the development of many of the other characters, even the undesirable ones. I could even get past some of the violence of the book. And while I understood the character development of some of the sex scenes, at times it felt that the author's 15 year old prepubescent self was doing some ghostwriting.

In the end, while the storyline wasn't too bad, it's a book that I will not recommend due to the gratuitous sex and violence.

Summary from Goodreads: Los Angeles, 1953. Lionel Walk is a young black caddy at Brookline, the oldest, most exclusive country club in the city, where he is known by the nickname “Train.” A troubled, keenly intelligent kid with no particular interest in his own prodigious talent for the game, he keeps his head down and his mouth shut as he navigates his way between the careless hostility of his “totes” and the explosive brutality of the other caddies.

Miller Packard, a sergeant with the San Diego police department, first appears on the boy’s horizon as a distracted gambler, bored with ordinary risks. Train names him the “Mile-Away Man” as they walk off the first tee, and even months later, when they have become partners of a sort and are winning high-stakes matches against golf hustlers all over the country, the Mile-Away Man is a puzzle to Train, remote and intimate, impulsive and thoughtful, often all at the same time.

Packard is also a puzzle to Norah Still, the beautiful lone survivor of a terrifying yacht hijacking, who is both aroused and repulsed by his violent and detached manner at the crime scene. Packard himself feels no such ambiguity. He is unequivocally drawn to Norah – and perhaps to what has happened to her – and an odd, volatile triangle takes shape, Packard pulling the other two relentlessly into deeper water, away from what is safe.