By James Boice

A McSweeney’s “New Writer” with a hard edge, a sharp ear, and a propulsive style takes on sports, violence, and celebrity, in a novel that will appeal to readers of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahnuik.

“Woman gets screwed in hotel room, man is arrested for murder. Man murders woman in hotel room. Rapes girl in hotel room then kills her. Girl, paid and sent by casino owners to make him feel welcome and make him like them, is murdered by celebrity. Girl sleeps with celebrity, dies.”

With a story that could have been torn from the headlines, MVP takes a brutal, unblinking look at the ugliness that fuels our media-obsessed society, which churns out far too many scandals—real or alleged—by too many cardboard heroes.

Like Tiger Woods, superstar basketball player Gilbert Morris is part black, part Asian. Like Kobe Bryant, he is accused of rape; like O.J. Simpson he is arrested for murder. But that’s just the prologue—MVP spirals out to tell Gilbert Marcus’s life story. The only child of a difficult and demanding father, who raised him to achieve greatness, he had lived a life of excessive privilege and suffocating obligation. He achieved everything that his father wanted for him—and became a monster along the way.

A startling and exciting new voice in fiction, James Boice has published stories in a number of literary magazines, including Like Water Burning and The Shore. He was featured in the McSweeney’s New Writers Issue in 2003 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005. MVP will bring him to the attention of the wide audience that he so richly deserves.

Publishers Weekly Starred Review

This stunning debut from Boice opens with Gilbert, a pro basketball star, raping and murdering a young woman in a Las Vegas resort. Boice then circles back to an account of Gilbert’s warped life, largely spent beneath the demanding thumb of Gilbert’s washed-up ballplayer father, Mervin, who sees in Gilbert a chance to capture the greatness that eluded him. Thus, Gilbert endures a regimen of awful health food (Mervin: “Death begins in the colon!”) and endless drills (running alongside his father’s car in the dark while Mervin throws coins at his head). Gilbert jumps straight from high school to the pros, where he racks up championships and MVP awards and secures global superstardom while still just an insecure (yet grossly narcissistic) man-child who is both seduced and tormented by the sex-and celebrity-obsessed culture he sits atop. Changing fortune brings a tanking team, a nationally televised humiliation, and money and marital problems, and the cracks in Gilbert’s psyche begin to spread ominously. When Boice revisits that night in the Vegas hotel room, Gilbert’s path from a lonely, sensitive boy to the monster choking an unnamed girl is clear, convincing and shocking. With its bristling intelligence and crystalline prose, this provocative novel secures Boice’s status as a player to watch. (May)

Entertainment Weekly Review: A-

Basketball star Gilbert Marcus, the refined son of an ex-jock, enters the pros straight from high school, gets a rival teammate traded after three straight titles, and is accused of a violent crime while committing adultery. Sound familiar? MVP is a brutally incisive roman a clef. Boice may not be an insider, but he seems to have opinions about Kobe Bryant. His jarring stream-of-consciousness prose clicks once you realize he’s given his narcissistic protagonist the deranged neuroses of a Bret Easton Ellis character. His portrait of Marcus is a frightening trip through the misogynistic, homophobic mind of a professional athlete.