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The Dumb Oxen. As for the plot, it is about a fighter called Eddie and his manager, Doc, and about how Eddie may or may not have made the middleweight crown. But another thing this book offers, apart from a reasonably, effective story, is wonderful examples of tough prose. One minor character is wondering about what happened to another character named Angelo. "Twenty to life," replies another character named Frankie. "He killed some poor slob run a candy store. They shoulda juiced him, but they give him twenty to life. Just a hood." The Professional, in short, is a classic example of the Heming-wayward conviction that small words must be used to denote big things.
The missing element in the book is, of course, the quality of thought. Hemingway's "dumb oxen" did not remain dumb, because Hemingway, after all, was capable of thought. Not so the sports-jacketed, impressively cicatriced authors who still follow Hemingway out of the Land of Letters into the Land of Ham. At one point Author Heinz has his Neanderthal narrator muse: "I can never figure out how the mind works." Somewhere there must be a literary line coach getting the squad together with the injunction: "Please, fellers, just once more, try for dear old Harper's, try figure how that mind works. Hit that mind with all you got."
The trouble is that you cannot write novels about boxers with boxing gloves.