Sooley

On the surface, Sooley resembles a morality tale about the dangers of fame and all-consuming ego. Samuel starts the novel as pure, naive, and innocent—he simply wants to play basketball and reunite with his family. He spends his time practicing, exercising, going to class, and working his minimum-wage job. Even though he is redshirted and doesn’t get to play in games, he is thrilled for the opportunity to just be on the team. But once he starts playing and his status grows, so does his ego. He gets annoyed with the strict and watchful eye of Ida, fails to call his mother and stops telling her things, and starts making decisions on his own. Once he is drafted into the NBA, he suddenly has access to money, and a new world opens to him. He falls prey to the temptations this new world offers, and his life is cut tragically short. Grisham’s tone in Samuel’s final chapters becomes censorious, describing the festival as “unbridled hedonism with seemingly no rules” (364). This gives the impression that Samuel’s death is entirely a consequence of his poor choices and weak character. However, this simplistic reading ignores several other important facets of the text.

First, there is a motif of luck that runs throughout the text, and Samuel’s overdose at the festival was certainly unlucky. When talking to the police investigator, Murray points out that Samuel did not have a history of drinking or recreational substance use. The first time Samuel partook in any kind of hard drugs, he overdosed. While this is certainly always a risk, the festival was full of people using such substances, and Samuel is the only one who overdosed. Additionally, as the story unfolds, the series of decisions that led Samuel to the festival hardly feel like decisions at all. Adults in his life may have suggested other options, but the circumstances of his life—he is a teenager in relative poverty, existing on the kindness of strangers, with what remains of his family trapped in a refugee camp—make entering the NBA draft seem almost nonnegotiable. Likewise, he didn’t choose the sudden rise to fame and constant adulation that led to his growing ego. Samuel simply played basketball, and the media hype machine turned him into a national star to further their own profits. Samuel did not even select Arnie Savage, who facilitated his trip to the festival; Reynard scouted him and wooed him with the luxurious lifestyle of a sports star.

Thus emerges a tragic paradox: Though Samuel’s fatal flaw—hedonism and perhaps recklessness—come from within, those internal qualities were almost fatalistically instilled from without. Classical tragedies (most famously Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex) typically present such paradoxes, with figures undone both by forces beyond their control and by their own hamartia. Samuel, too, is driven to his tragic end by circumstances that seem predetermined and even influenced by supernatural elements, even while that sense of destiny is at once bound up to his extraordinary fortune. Within fame and wealth, blessing and curse converge fatally. Samuel’s “good” fortune leads to him signing with Arnie Savage, who not only facilitates Samuel attending the festival but uses the idea of a luxurious, hedonistic lifestyle to lure him in. Ultimately, this combination of turning collegiate athletes into celebrities, exploiting them for profit, and then leaving them under the care of opportunistic sports agents is as much to blame as poor individual choices.