First published in 1962, Willeford’s novel Cockfighter is the story of one man and his what might be called an obsession with winning the Cockfighter of the Year award. That trophy alone would satisfy Frank Mansfield. To him, nothing else really mattered. The story opens with Frank betting everything, from his trailer to his car on a match and noting that he had no choice under custom but that pay off and walk away with nothing in his hands but an empty cage as his bird didn’t survive. He even threw in Dodi, the sixteen year old farm picker’s daughter who had run off with him and now he didn’t know quite what to do with her. Meanwhile, Frank has a fiancé at home in Ocala, one he’d been engaged to for eight years and wouldn’t marry yet though he loved her because he wouldn’t give up his vocation of fighting birds. Mary Eliazbeth wanted him to settle down with a normal job and be a husband and a father.

To further complicate matters, Willeford presents Frank as a silent man who has taken a vow of silence till he wins the Southern Tournament. He communicates by hand signals and notes. Frank is a proud man and though at one point reduced to playing guitar for money, playing the only three songs he knew, he wouldn’t take charity.

Willeford never paints Frank as a saint, but as one who had a singleminded pursuit of a goal, to the exclusion of all else. For Frank, all that really mattered was winning at the tournament and he would abide by the rules no matter the outcome. Despite this, there are many in the story eager to break the customs and to welsh on their bets, bit not Frank. He would use any edge he could get, any trick, any additive, but they had to be within the rules.

The reader here will learn more about the sport of cockfighting than the reader could imagine whether you want to hear all the gory details. At its heart, it’s a story of obsession, of singlemindedness, of all that comes with it. There’s also a sense that the sport is pure and Willeford makes fun of others who tell their stories and those who put on airs. The fact that Frank doesn’t speak leaves lots of room for people to make fools of themselves.

Willeford himself said the book is loosely tied to Homer’s Odyssey. The key here is loosely. Like Ulysses, Frank can’t get home to Ocala until he accomplishes his tasks, but the parallel is rather loose.

Willeford himself wrote the screenplay when this was turned into a movie, but it was not a commercial success.

On pure technique, writing style and ability to portray a culture, this book should get five stars. But while the shop talk about cockfighting is amazingly detailed and impressive, I could give a rat's ass about cockfighting. I never would have read a book with that much shop talk about anything, though admittedly I loved Gun Work by David J. Schow, so I guess I'm a hypocrite. I also find it kind of hard to take the violence involving animals. Last but far from least, this is not a noir or a crime novel; it's a down-and-outer type novel, and a great portrait of a certain culture in the South. But I was kinda looking for a crime novel, and when I got to the end and nobody'd gotten their head blown off, I was a bit disappointed.

To be fair, I love Willeford's The Burnt Orange Heresy and that has a murder that seems to be there for no reason other than to make it a crime novel (presumably so he could sell it) and it feels fairly random, with a disappointing ending. So I'm glad he didn't do that here. On its own terms, Cockfighter is a stronger novel than Heresy. There's just kind of a lot of cockfighting in it.

Fabulous book, fabulous film.

I can't say I enjoyed this book, but it was well done. Also, it's not noir, as the jacket would suggest (and I read it because I wanted to read a noir). It is, however, a moving portrait of someone so focused on "success" that he ignores everything that makes him human. Also, of course, it provides a detailed look at the southern world of cock fighting, which is just a bleak and violent as you'd expect.

I found this to be a tough read. Not because the English is difficult to get through but because the subject matter and the protagonist have both aged terribly. The main character is a narcissist who truly considers himself to be the protagonist. I don't think he learns anything over the course of the book and the random violence associated with the cockfights is sometimes tough to swallow.

As an aside, the Kindle version that I read was filled with typos, text that seemed to be copy-pasted in wrong spots, etc.

Do not recommend.

This was everything thing I hoped for. A different world and a protagonist who was both ruthless and artistic. Not a spoiler, but this isn’t a crime novel.

One of Willeford's best. One thing I love about Willeford is that he is by no means a formulaic writer, and you never know how things will go. The anticipated climaxes can be anti-climactic, veering toward the symbolic, and the real climaxes happen when you least suspect them, in ways that you never would have imagined. Willeford has a way of tearing your heart out and holding it out before you in all its frustration and embarrassment. In this novel, he reminds us of the cruelty of an animal (not just animal cruelty) that still dwells within us, and shows us that it can only be tamed if we accept it as a part of ourselves.

I read this on the recommendation of Dwight Garner and was expecting a serious deconstruction of masculinity, the allure of violence, the primal joy of bloodlust, and the "a rolling stone carries no moss" nomadic lifestyle of the devoted but was instead treated to a pretty standard version of the Hero's Quest. To my surprise, I actually preferred the book that I got. Frank Mansfield is a compelling main character and his muteness was an authorial stroke of genius. It kept him somehow unknowable to the reader, keeping us off-balance in a world where everybody we met on the journey with him knew more about our guide than we did. The training and fighting violence is extreme without being gratuitous or embellished - just the kind of discomfort that I look for in novels, the kind that makes me think about things that I don't think about without prompt and will never experience on my own
I liked "Cockfighter" a lot (just shy of loving it) but can tell that it's a book that will feel like a favorite in memory

Saw this on the "Approval Matrix" on the back page of the May 30th New York magazine that some left at a party at my house. It seems to promise a Nathanial West like ride and I am looking forward to it.

****

Well it wasn't Nathanial West and not quite Jim Thompson. Willeford does a great job at exposing the intricacies of raising and fighting gamecocks. The protagonist, Frank Mansfield, is the sort of male lead that we can expect from this sort of book. He is self made, self confident, without much compassion and totally clueless about women. Mansfield is good at fighting chickens, playing music and not much else. The plot of the book is small and there are few twists or turns to the narrative. I kept hoping that there would be some sort of caper but it never developed.

If you like Thompson-esque reads this would work for you but don't count on it going much beyond the sport of cockfighting.

Imagine a book about that one part of Final Fantasy 7 where you had to raise and race chocobos but written for Boomers. This awful narrator is all about codes of honor and fairness. It's sickening. A boss gives him a little too much money for what he thinks would be a fair wage so he gives half of it back! Then, when a woman gives him too much money for basically being a gigolo, he finds something of his that is roughly equal to the extra money - and destroys it! He says that if he feeds his cocks enough food it would have the effect on them that the welfare state would have on mankind. Not shitting you, that is literally in there almost verbatim. But lamest of all is the real reason you can tell it's about cockfighting - since you can't really throw a match, it's the fairest betting sport there is. Willeford goes to great pains to lay down rigid rules for this world so that he can delight in humiliating anyone who is a cheat. And of course our boy Frank humiliates all the cheats! As he stays slow and steady, our main character says he doesn't win because of luck, he wins because of experience and practice. A homily for the meritocracy! He can reconcile himself to being a no good sonofabitch because he at least doesn't have to work in an office like a peckerhead - he's his own boss!

Imagine a pulp novel written for complete squares (no, not a YA novel...) and this is your book.

Wow...I never thought a book about a cockfighter would be so interesting. I only bought this book because it had such a high rating here on goodreads. And even after I got it, it sat on my shelf for awhile. I kept looking over at it thinking, a book about cockfighting..? Not today. But after I read the first page I knew I was hooked. Willeford's style is very detailed and straightforward. I still can't quite figure out what about his style is so captivating, especially considering the great detail he goes into at times. But I found myself really wanting to know and understand what he was talking about when it came to all the nitty gritty details of cockfighting. I haven't read a book so quickly and enjoyed one so much in over a year. Just a great book. Period.

Silent Frank Mansfield is a really bad guy who is sure he's a good guy for most of the book, but maybe figures out in the end and accepts, what he really is -- which as stated, is a really bad guy. Willeford doesn't pull any punches so you'd better not have a soft spot for roosters (or women) if you pick up this book. I think I read a review of this that called it the Moby Dick of cockfighting. That's a pretty good description. A lot of technical though one has to say practically useless information about getting a chicken ready to fight and then fighting them is provided, there's a long quest and a journey with a few interesting side characters, and there's a bigger theme throughout about man's general nature. Weirdly entertaining and disturbing and I'm not sure that I'm glad I spent the time with it, but credit has to be given for the consistent writing and originality.