Don't Know Tough by Eli Cranor
By Eli Cranor
Soho Press, 2022
ISBN: 9781641293457
Eli Cranor opens his debut novel, Don’t Know Tough, with a lean, ten-word epigraph from Charles Portis’s legendary work, True Grit: “There is no knowing what is in a man’s heart.”
The line never made it to the films, but it’s tempting to imagine John Wayne (later, Jeff Bridges; two Titans of Tough), eyepatched and horsebacked as Rooster Cogburn, muttering the line after shooting back a tumbler of whiskey, or maybe spitting a stream of tobacco into the dirt. It’s tempting, too, to take the statement at face value, to leave it unexplored and uncomplicated; we are often a culture guilty of moving hot and cold between admonishing and excusing the violence of men. It’s easier, maybe, to pretend men are unknowable. That a deep, tormented battle underlies the tense stoicism, the eruptions of rage, and the leaks of tenderness expected of men in Western canon. Maybe a man’s heart isn’t unknowable at all; just unexplainable.
Cranor’s response? Challenge accepted.
Don’t Know Tough takes place in Cranor’s home state of Arkansas in the weeks leading up to the state’s high school football championship. In a small town at the foot of the Ozarks, the Denton Pirates have a shot at the title for the first time in over a decade. This is in dual thanks to the team’s new head coach, Trent Powers, a California transplant known more for his Prius than his prowess, and Billy Lowe, a volatile senior running back whose troubled home life blazes into mean talent on the field. While Trent tries to harness Billy’s violence for the playoffs, the Pirates’ victory run is complicated when a fight in Billy’s trailer ends in a murder investigation.
The book is Cranor’s love note to football—to the boys the game raises up and razes down, to the men who cling to it, to anyone who’s stepped foot on the fifty to shake hands on a Friday night. He writes, through the viewpoint of Coach Powers, “It should be illegal, Trent thinks, the power the game has over men, a blinding, burning feeling, a drug—that’s what football is.” The book has been likened to a Southern-noir version of Friday Night Lights, and while Cranor waxes poetic about the game, he’s not shy about subbing out glory for grit and beer and bloated dead bodies.
The book is also a sincere meditation on the ties between tenderness and violence, and how boys like Billy Lowe and men like Trent Powers find themselves caught between the two. Billy narrates half the novel in a blunt, tough first-person, and his chapters are filled with sentences and paragraphs that juxtapose the soft and the hard: “Thinking about love when I ram my helmet through that Harrison kick returner heart,” Billy tells us after making an especially brutal tackle.
All book long, through his own eyes and in his own voice, we learn of the violence that built Billy, and how that violence serves as a stand in for all the emotions and behaviors never modeled for him: “…make me think about crying,” Billy says, “or breaking Jarred’s face.”
In the same way Cranor doesn’t flinch from football’s violence, he doesn’t ignore the racism, classism, or sexism of the game—or of Denton. Don Bradshaw, the high school’s principal, makes blatant racist remarks about Billy’s possible parentage, and Billy’s race remains under scrutiny by Bradshaw and others throughout the novel. Powers faces pressure to play the less-talented sons of Denton’s upper class, and Billy is constantly isolated from his team due to class barriers.
The women of Don’t Know Tough all live in orbit to Denton’s men-only football culture, and they’re left to assert agency through sex and domesticity. This is most noticeable through Tina—Billy’s mother and one of the most tragic characters in the book—who loses everything to the events unfolding around her, but never stops aching to love her boys, often through food: “The cast-iron skillet she’s used for years to scramble the boys’ eggs, fry their bacon, just about the only love she’d been able to give her boys was fried up in that pan.”
The novel culminates in the Cranor version of a cinematic Spielberg showdown, the violence of Denton and the murder mystery culminating into a sticky, rending conclusion. By the end of the novel, though, like all the best stories, the plot is secondary. The real resolution—the one to remember—comes from the skill Cranor employs in showing us the complex web a game like football can spin.
By the last page, it’s clear Cranor loves the game—yes, he does—but he also sees it for what it can often be: a violent, complicated mess. More than anything, Cranor wants us to know that Portis was wrong. There are ways to know a man’s heart. It might not be pretty, and it might not end happily, but there are ways to see the hurt; there are ways to stop it, maybe, before it’s too late. You just gotta find the right lens. And for men like Trent Powers, for boys like Billy Lowe, Cranor's found that lens. It’s football.
Colin Bonini is a writer from San Jose, California. He is a current MFA candidate in fiction at Arizona State University and an associate editor at Hayden's Ferry Review. His fiction and nonfiction appears or is forthcoming in Silver Rose Magazine, The Adroit Journal, Wig-Wag, and elsewhere.