Rude Behavior

Between kick-off and pay dirt, Jenkins visits his usual haunts: saloons, locker rooms, bedrooms, front offices, and the field. With rambunctious good spirit, he steers us from the dust of Texas to the glitter of New York and Hollywood. Sure, it's a funny novel--rudeness and crudeness abound--but it's also a novel that insists on tackling the game's problems, piling onto human foibles, intercepting overbearing stupidity, blindsiding political correctness, splitting the uprights with the virtues of hard work and good friendship, and still leaving enough room to slip in advice for disarming airplane smoke detectors. From Jenkins, who would want to accept less? --Jeff Silverman

Product Description
The good-ole-boy heroes of Dan Jenkins' Semi-Tough and Life Its Ownself are back in this exuberant tale of football and other excesses. Rude Behavior finds Billy Clyde Puckett, former New York Giant football god and later television announcer, as general manager and part-owner of a new NFL team, the West Texas Tornadoes. His old drinking partner-in-crime and favorite receiver, Shake Tiller, has written a bestselling book, The Average Man's History of the World, and his nearly perfect wife, Barbara Jane, is in Hollywood, making a movie with Shake, who happens to be her old flame. Meanwhile, Billy Clyde's father-in-law, Big Ed Bookman, who is more Texas than oil and is majority owner of the Tornadoes, is trying to lure the old Giants coach, T.J. Lambert, to run his new team. And Billy Clyde has met a bartender named Kelly Sue Woodley, a wiseass beauty who works at a joint called "He Ain't Here" and causes some major marital discord.

All these folks are back to take part in some serious fun, which in Jenkinsland means football, plenty of "young scotches," athletic exploits on the field and in the bedroom, a lot of riffs about the stupidity of "gubmint reg-you-layshuns," and the sublime beauty of country music. Hilarious, stubbornly retrograde, and laced with affection for everything Texas football stands for, Rude Behavior is vintage Dan Jenkins.


From the Hardcover edition.

The novel is a bit lengthy and is slow at the beginning. However Jenkins mixes football (both fictional and historical) with hollywood, social issues and political correctivness. Bring back the cast from "Semi-Tough" was great for the reader, but might of lost the new reader.

The book is not quite as funny as "You Got To Play Hurt", which would be a better buy for the new Jenkins reader. However if you like Dan Jenkins, football and aren't easily offended this one is a must read.


Jenkins mails one in   March 10, 1999
 3 out of 3 found this review helpful

I've read most of Jenkins books over the years and I've noticed an unfortunate trend - namely, as Jenkins gets older and more curmudgeonly, he feels the need to spend 400 pages proving he can be more of a neanderthal than virtually any other writer working today. I'm sure Dan and many of his more loyal fans would protest that "Rude Behavior" is merely Jenkins' expose on the excesses of political correctness (of which there are many, to be sure). But this book has a "slapped-together to meet a contractual obligation" feel to it. It' is neither the parody nor the satire as one has come to expect from Jenkins. Instead, it is merely a rant about everything in modern society that Dan disapproves of. Jenkins spends so much time trying to force lame jokes onto the page that he seems to have run out of time to include a plot or any sort of character development. And it still takes him 400 pages to take on all the "shirt-lifters," minorities, liberals and others who apparently pose such a threat to Dan's world. In the end there just isn't much "there" there. If you haven't read the earlier books in this series, I suspect you'd have no idea who the hell these characters are supposed to be other than stereotypes of West Texas bigots. Perhaps the time has come for Dan Jenkins to sit back with a young Scotch and a Marlboro and bask in the glow of his earlier, far more successful novels. To continue to cash in on the effort expended on his earlier, better books is simply an embarassment.