A SHORT MOVE
By Katherine Hill

Mitch Wilkins, a child football prodigy caught up in family drama, has never met his dad. His more grounded Uncle Tim is his live-in male role model and his first coach, with a fundamentals philosophy the other boys don’t care for despite big wins. Mitch’s mom is the sadder-but-wiser type, who doesn’t let Tim all the way into their lives, dotes on her son. Even fatherless, Mitch is going places. He was born practically with a football in his hands. We love him from the start.

I’ve never cared for multiperspective books (well, “As I Lay Dying,” but Faulkner set the bar high): Just as you’re getting comfortable with one persona, in comes the next. But though Katherine Hill works one character at a time — portrait by portrait, psyche by psyche, time frame by time frame — in her novel “A Short Move,” she crafts a deftly detached third person to speak with one voice.

We linger most often in Mitch’s head, but the concerns and sacrifices and interior lives of the people around him help delineate the cost of his sports dream. Mitch is pure purpose and focus; the others are left to feel the feelings, worry the worries, lose the things that get lost. Emotionally awkward, Mitch has a beautiful ease on the field, an ease born not just of his own hard work but of the uneven efforts of his father, his uncle, his devoted mom. Also teachers, successive girlfriends, wives and lovers, children, grandchildren. And, of course, the people of the game: owners, teammates, coaches and fans. Ultimately, though, the glory of the field goes by, leaving disease, which comes with its own dedicated crew — therapists, hapless ministers, physicians, the scientist who will in the end dissect Mitch’s damaged brain.

Mitch is a linebacker, and in his prime, he is a fearsome befuddler of blockers, a killer of quarterbacks. He battles his way from the kiddie leagues through high school stardom to college, where the game’s still a lark for him. Injury complicates things, but only for a year here, a game there — and he always comes back better than ever. Religion, sure, but it’s not much use on the field, where the only god is clobber, and Mitch the high priest. After college (the football powerhouse University of Miami), it’s on to the N.F.L. (and my Patriots).

Later, of course, he’s traded (to Philly, ugh, but good for him). The beauty of the novel is that the teams don’t particularly matter. You go from one to another, your career hurtles on, your exhaustion grows. The pace of the storytelling here is breakneck — an entire life wind-sprints past — an elegant time-lapse in which we see the flower bud, bloom, wither, die. A short move, let’s call it.

There are very few scenes of football here, only enough to get the flavor of the hits, the taste of blood, the price of the zone, the attraction of attention, the distraction of it, too. Instead of dramatic play-by-play and hackneyed triumph, Hill gives us the more quotidian moments that come after the game, between seasons, after the sun of youth sets, some of them cruel: locker room, ice bath, lonely limo, team hotel, champagne drying in the hair, family and personal milestones utterly missed. She saves the action for bigger themes that define the contemporary game, like health, race and free agency. And, of course, the sport’s lifeblood, the consuming lava that boils up through all the interstices: money, money, money.

This is definitely a good book for football fans. But it’s a great book for fans of men and boys, so many of them caught up in the dark world of dreams come true. And in that way, “A Short Move” isn’t about football at all.