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Book Review: The Moves Make the Man
I found Bruce Brooks’ other Newbery Honor book, What Hearts, a dull and emotionally distancing read, so I approached the 1985 Newbery Honor winner The Moves Make the Man glumly. Indeed, I approached it with great trepidation, because Brooks is a white man writing a book about a black teenager who befriends a troubled white boy. “Narrator tells the story of their Troubled Friend who generally dies horribly” is a recognizable Newbery plot and one with a lot of room for unpleasant racial undertones when the narrator is black and the Troubled Friend around whom the story revolves is white.
But our narrator, Jerome Foxworthy, has a compelling and emotionally immediate voice, such a contrast to What Hearts that I actually checked to make sure there weren’t perhaps two authors named Bruce Brooks. The prose is beautiful and the central friendship is convincing and effective, which frankly I NEVER thought I would say about friendship in a Newbery book involving a Troubled Child.
Jerome Foxworthy and Bix Rivers are drawn together because they’re both smart athletes - smart in the sense of book-smart, but also in the sense of a really intense, focused athletic drive, in an approach to their chosen sports that is almost like that of a musician to an instrument. They practice and practice not for applause or even to contribute to a team but out of a respect for the art of that sport itself. I do not care about basketball but the athletic descriptions here are so poetic and evocative and clear that they made me care about basketball.
They are also drawn together because they feel out of place in their high school. Jerome is the only Black kid in school, because the school district grimly followed the letter of integration law by integrating exactly one block of the Black side of town. Bix’s mother is in a mental hospital, and his stepfather is an asshole. They meet as the only boys in the home ec close, which Jerome is taking because his mother had an accident (she recovers. Jerome’s family life contains the usual quotient of sibling irritation but is overall a bright stable spot in his life), and Bix is taking because his mother is in a mental hospital and his stepfather is an asshole who doesn’t look after him.
But the differences between the boys are also crucial. Jerome’s problems are mostly external, like the asshole basketball coach who won’t let him join the high school team because he’s Black. Bix, in contrast, is an emotional mess.
In children’s books this sort of friendship often revolves around the troubled child’s problems. You have the Troubled Child and Their Friend (usually the narrator) Who Would Do Anything to Help Them. In the Newbery-winning version of this story, it always turns out that Anything is not enough.
Jerome would not do Anything. He likes Bix a lot - in fact, the friendship is far more convincing than many literary friendships involving a troubled child, which sometimes feel as if the author is holding the characters at gunpoint demanding that they hang out in the service of this Very Important Message, dammit. That is not the case here. I absolutely believe that Jerome and Bix like each other and enjoy spending time together.
But Jerome absolutely has limits. He has a lot of things going on in his own life and very little time for Bix’s bullshit. He knows Bix has problems, and he knows he doesn’t really understand those problems; he is sometimes patient and sympathetic, but he’s just as capable of blowing up at Bix if Bix’s bad behavior pushes his buttons.
Bix, meanwhile, has very particular ideas about what kind of help he wants, and it’s generally stuff like “I want you to ref this one-on-one basketball game I’m playing against my stepdad, because I bet him that if I won he would have to take me to see my mom in the mental hospital.”
Naturally Jerome says yes, because he’s a junior high student and that’s exactly the sort of thing that seems completely reasonable when you’re in junior high, even though an adult can see the whole situation is batshit insane.
( Spoilers for the ending )
I will add (in the interests of full disclosure) that I suspect an author today would make different choices than Brooks did about the use of racial slurs. They are not used casually or pervasively, and it feels like Brooks thought about each one. But, at the end of the day, the book is nearly forty years old, standards have shifted in the intervening decades, and the modern reader may wish to go in forewarned.
But our narrator, Jerome Foxworthy, has a compelling and emotionally immediate voice, such a contrast to What Hearts that I actually checked to make sure there weren’t perhaps two authors named Bruce Brooks. The prose is beautiful and the central friendship is convincing and effective, which frankly I NEVER thought I would say about friendship in a Newbery book involving a Troubled Child.
Jerome Foxworthy and Bix Rivers are drawn together because they’re both smart athletes - smart in the sense of book-smart, but also in the sense of a really intense, focused athletic drive, in an approach to their chosen sports that is almost like that of a musician to an instrument. They practice and practice not for applause or even to contribute to a team but out of a respect for the art of that sport itself. I do not care about basketball but the athletic descriptions here are so poetic and evocative and clear that they made me care about basketball.
They are also drawn together because they feel out of place in their high school. Jerome is the only Black kid in school, because the school district grimly followed the letter of integration law by integrating exactly one block of the Black side of town. Bix’s mother is in a mental hospital, and his stepfather is an asshole. They meet as the only boys in the home ec close, which Jerome is taking because his mother had an accident (she recovers. Jerome’s family life contains the usual quotient of sibling irritation but is overall a bright stable spot in his life), and Bix is taking because his mother is in a mental hospital and his stepfather is an asshole who doesn’t look after him.
But the differences between the boys are also crucial. Jerome’s problems are mostly external, like the asshole basketball coach who won’t let him join the high school team because he’s Black. Bix, in contrast, is an emotional mess.
In children’s books this sort of friendship often revolves around the troubled child’s problems. You have the Troubled Child and Their Friend (usually the narrator) Who Would Do Anything to Help Them. In the Newbery-winning version of this story, it always turns out that Anything is not enough.
Jerome would not do Anything. He likes Bix a lot - in fact, the friendship is far more convincing than many literary friendships involving a troubled child, which sometimes feel as if the author is holding the characters at gunpoint demanding that they hang out in the service of this Very Important Message, dammit. That is not the case here. I absolutely believe that Jerome and Bix like each other and enjoy spending time together.
But Jerome absolutely has limits. He has a lot of things going on in his own life and very little time for Bix’s bullshit. He knows Bix has problems, and he knows he doesn’t really understand those problems; he is sometimes patient and sympathetic, but he’s just as capable of blowing up at Bix if Bix’s bad behavior pushes his buttons.
Bix, meanwhile, has very particular ideas about what kind of help he wants, and it’s generally stuff like “I want you to ref this one-on-one basketball game I’m playing against my stepdad, because I bet him that if I won he would have to take me to see my mom in the mental hospital.”
Naturally Jerome says yes, because he’s a junior high student and that’s exactly the sort of thing that seems completely reasonable when you’re in junior high, even though an adult can see the whole situation is batshit insane.
( Spoilers for the ending )
I will add (in the interests of full disclosure) that I suspect an author today would make different choices than Brooks did about the use of racial slurs. They are not used casually or pervasively, and it feels like Brooks thought about each one. But, at the end of the day, the book is nearly forty years old, standards have shifted in the intervening decades, and the modern reader may wish to go in forewarned.