Baja Oklahoma

Dan Jenkins was a great sportswriter for many years, mainly known for his work with Sports Illustrated. He was also a novelist, and wrote two famous works about sports--Semi-Tough, about football, and Dead Solid Perfect, about golf. He wrote several others, including Baja Oklahoma, which is about a group of people in Fort Worth, Texas. Judging by this one, I don't care to read any others.

Baja Oklahoma isn't so much a novel as a string of one-liners. The characters, save for one, are not really human beings but types--the crude former football star, the rich guy toting around a trophy girlfriend, a professor of English who speaks like no professor I've ever heard, and so on. They all hang out at Herb's, a bar and grill in Fort Worth, and exchange wisecracks. This is all well and good, but when every character has the same sense of humor it becomes tedious. I almost quit this book a few times.

The only character with any depth is the main one, Juanita Hutchins, who tends bar at Herb's and writes songs. She longs to become a bona fide songwriter, and the very thin plot has her giving some songs to a guy in a band who promises to listen to them. Jenkins writes the lyrics for these songs, and they don't seem half bad, but it's hard to imagine them without hearing the music.

Published in 1981, the book also features only white characters who freely express their racism and sexism. The N word is liberally thrown around, without any judgment. And women, despite Juanita's presence, are merely sexual objects. Consider: "A steel-bellied airhead was a young woman with a butt like a baby robin, a frightening set of homegrown jugs, and a stomach flatter than the stainless-steel door to the safety deposit boxes." Jugs, really?

Juanita has a man-hungry best friend who seems straight out of a sit-com, and a daughter shacked up with drug dealer (this doesn't seem to bother Juanita much, and she actually helps). Jenkins seems to be thumbing his nose at any notions of political correctness, but this is beyond political correctness, it's just mean and nasty.

As I said, every character cracks wise like a comedian on Hee-Haw. One section has it a raw day and every patron of Herb's has a metaphor: "Tommy Earl Bruner hung up his sheepskin jacket, and said, “No offense, Juanita, but it’s colder outside than a snowman’s cock.” "Shorty Eckwood came in with Herb. “I wish you’d look at me,” he said. “I’m shakin’ like a dog shittin’ peach seeds.” And so on.

There were a few good lines. I liked "In only twelve years of marriage, Bonnie fancifully transformed herself from Rita Hayworth into Joseph Stalin." But otherwise, I found this book boring and not funny. Guess you have to be from Texas.