Katz, Bob. Third and Long. Minneapolis: Trolley Car Press, 2010. $15.

At first glance, Bob Katz’s Third and Long appears to be a typical tale of stranger-comes-to-small-town-to-fix-something. (In this case high school football.)  In doing so, he turns a can’t-do town into a city on the move. There is also a redemption story for the down-on-his-luck protagonist, Nick, who is a wanderer burdened with faded Notre Dame glory days.  But what separates Third and Long from The Bad News Bears is that Katz consciously places his fictional company town of Longview, Ohio, in the Rust Belt-era, spending much of the novel trying to capture what that means.

Time and narration are the tools Katz uses to create the post-industrial Ohio Valley (Steubenville without the steel mills).  Third and Long is told from the point of view of the town.  There is no single narrator, just an invisible voice that takes the form of past and present generations of Longview residents.   (Think the narrator of old Christmas specials, such as Frosty the Snowman.)  This voice does not represent those who moved away from Longview or those who run the town.  Instead, the narrator is the voice of those who have the least control of their destiny, those who “are engaged on a full-time basis in getting by.”  They hope someone from Longview will make it big elsewhere, they hope that the factory stays open, but what they want most of all is for life not to change.

This narrator has the classic Midwest attitude of putting down the community, but also sincerely believing it is the only place he would ever live.  He comes across with a self-pitying, defeatist attitude through much of the story — but in a good way. “If winning is all we cared about,” says the narrator, “we’d have been smarter to have just picked up and leave.”   It is the old fly-over defense mechanism: he knows his vision of the glory days is very much bullshit, but he also knows that this idea of yesterday is probably the best he will have.  Yesterday, every fella in town was a somebody on the football team.  Compare that to today, where the factory may be purchased by the Koreans, no one cares about the annual tree lighting anymore, and there are hardly enough successful businesses to keep the Chamber of Commerce going.

Notably, the narrator strongly represents the older generations of Longview.  For a high school football story, the game holds much more value for the aged.  The kids are very much in the small town, Rust Belt limbo where they have no future.  It is assumed that they will make the same mistakes as their parents.  But as opposed to Our Town, it is also assumed that life will not be as good for them as it was for their parents.  Some town boosters push for changing the town and embracing the future, but the general consensus is that residents would like to return to the past.

Our hero, Nick Remke most embodies this era that may never have existed.  He arrives in town by Amtrak, whereas the book states repeatedly that Longview is a car-only town, he lives in a early 20th-century flophouse, he spent his life traveling the country working brief stints in the quintessentially outsourced textile industry. (Steubenville, on which Longview seems partly based, was known as the Jeans Capital of the Country…in the 19th century.)

In the end, the Longview Bobcats do not play a sudden death match against an unlikable Korean football team in order to save the textile factory from outsourcing. Instead Katz goes for a more Capra-esque finale.  The effect is slightly anachronistic, more suited to a time when things were looking up for small towns in America. But given the hope-will-conquer-all mood of Third and Long, perhaps it fits.

Read more reviews and purchase Third and Long online here.

James Nickras earned a BA in English from the University of Akron in 2001 and a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science from Kent State University in 2002. He is the author of The Ohio Book Review.