The Cockfighter
Reviews

"This challenging and disturbing novel is the most important enactment of the stages of a young man's growing up that I have read since Catcher in the Rye. It is not only profoundly convincing but also laced here and there with the hilarity of double meanings."
-A.R. Ammons

"The Cockfighter is terrific, extremely moving and insightful-a coming-of-age story of a most unusual sort."
-Clifford Geertz, anthropologist, Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton University, author of Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight

"Sonny Cantrell is nearly 13 when he receives a champion fighting cock called Lion as a present from his father, who hopes that handling the bird will teach the boy how to be a man. On the day Frank Manley's haunting novel begins, Jake Cantrell is ready to let Sonny handle Lion in the lethal combat known as a derby. This rough rite of passage, which has a profound and unexpected effect on the boy, is the focus of The Cockfighter. Set in the rural, trailer-park South, it depicts a world that Manley (a professor of literature and director of the creative writing program at Emory University) describes with little passion but with carefully chosen detail, illuminating a blue-collar culture in which violence is not only condoned but often admired. He also brings the same descriptive skill to the lore of cockfighting-and to the characters who use it to define their best (and worst) impulses. Jake, for example, may be an abusive husband but he is, in his own way, also a loving father. And Lily, Jake's browbeaten wife, persists in struggling to be a good mother. At first, The Cockfighter may appear to be God's Little Acre revisited, but as it proceeds it acquires its own distinctive mythic power."
-The New York Times Book Review, David Murray
May 10, 1998

"Manley captures the volatile thoughts and feelings of a 12-year-old boy as the young hero of this spare, suspenseful debut steps outside of the shelter of his mother's care and into his father's arena. In this case, the arena is a cockfighting ring in the Deep South, and Sonny, who is referred to simply as 'the boy' (or 'you little shit') throughout the novel, has been awarded the honor of being official handler for his father's champion rooster. The boy loves the bird and has secretly named it Lion, though his father forbids any affection that might tame it and detract from its moneymaking potential. At the seedy arena, where men in field jackets and camouflage resemble 'a unit in a rebel army somewhere in Central America' and the women are 'as gaudy as flowers,' the boy tries hard to maintain his father's bravado and detachment, while the events of the day change him forever. Manley writes dialogue that always rings true and depicts with sad clarity one desperate night in the alcoholic life of the boy's Uncle Homer. But it is the unforgettable boy himself who steals this deftly constructed show in a subtly foreshadowed ending that is at once surprising and entirely fitting."
-Publishers Weekly
January 26, 1998

"The Cockfighter is the simple and gripping tale of a boy poised on the edge of manhood. His father gives him a fighting cock to handle at a cockfight. At stake is not only some $2,000 of his father's money, but the boy's masculinity, his sense of himself. Win or lose, his identity hangs in the balance. Most of the book concerns the tight triangle between the boy, his mother, Lily, who wants to nurture and protect him, and his father, who, cursing and whoring, is pulling the boy into the wider world of men. In the end, the boy shatters the tension and asserts himself on his own devastating terms. Manley, a poet and short-story writer, has written a taut and suspenseful first novel. The poet shines through; the book reads like mythology."
-Minnesota Monthly
June 1998

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