Dan Jenkins’ Last Hurrah – “The Reunion at Herb’s Café” ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (out of five)

I’ll admit that it is difficult for me to be totally objective when I write about Dan Jenkins. Reading Dan’s work, specifically, his first golf novel, Dead Solid Perfect, sparked my nascent interest in golf and inspired me to try my hand at writing about the game myself. Since that first encounter with his words I have done my best to keep up with everything he wrote subsequently, and have backtracked to read his old columns in Sports Illustrated and Playboy, and his earlier books.

Jenkins’ death, on March 7, 2019, was a great loss to the world of sports writing, but fans of Jenkin’s work got a welcome bit of news when it was announced that the manuscript of a final book was on his desk when he passed, which would be published after a quick polish by his daughter, Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins. This book, The Reunion at Herb’s Café, is the result.

Reunion is a walk down Memory Lane for Dan Jenkins fans. Built around the core story of Herb’s Café being purchased from Herb’s widow by Fort Worth hometown boy Tommy Earl Bruner, the story is mostly an excuse for bringing back some beloved characters from Jenkins’ earlier novels and providing a “where-are-they-now”–style wrap-up on what they’ve been doing with their lives since the novels they featured in were closed out.

It’s a fun read, especially for fans of Semi-Tough and its followups, Life Its Ownself and Rude Behavior, and Baja Oklahoma, whose characters are featured. New character and narrator Tommy Earl Bruner, a long-time buddy of Billy Clyde Puckett, Shake Tiller, and Barbara Jane Bookman, is introduced and given the usual Jenkins protagonist treatment, mirroring the author’s own life. Twice-divorced but newly hooked-up with a fabulous new gal, former Paschal High/TCU/pro footballer Tommy Earl becomes a business partner of Barbara Jane’s daddy, “Big Ed” Bookman, when he strikes oil on a large plot of snake-infested prairie that he inherits from his parents.

It’s difficult to have to say this, but this book is further evidence, after 2017’s weakly conceived and executed Stick A Fork In Me, of Jenkins’ final-years decline. It is, overall, a nice stroll down Memory Lane for Jenkins’ fans, unfortunately marred by the increasingly strident diatribes against “libs and socialist college professors”, and an ending—which I will not discuss specifically, to avoid spoilers—which is ridiculous, and frankly, disappointing. It is these aspects of the narrative, which come late in the book, which let the reader (or at least this reader) down. I rank Reunion a notch above  Stick A Fork In Me, which is faint praise, but it falls well short of  Dead Solid Perfect, Semi-Tough and his other classic romps through the worlds of sports, and Texas.