Matthew Salesses selected “Back Line” by Raf Richardson-Carillo as the winner of our 2024 Novel Excerpt Contest. The excerpt explores a former football player’s history with one of the sport’s legends. Editorially, The Masters Review has long conversations about what makes a great excerpt. It’s a hard question to answer, but as the saying goes, we know it when we see it. In this From the Archives piece, assistant editor Brandon Williams digs into what makes this excerpt especially great.
Introduction
In “Back Line” by Raf Richardson-Carillo, winner of our 2024 Novel Excerpt Contest, we meet a former footballer (soccer player, for our American heathens (of which I am one)) who is shuffling together his memories and notes about a contemporary great with whom he was acquainted in passing. This piece is written in reflective first person, from a narrator looking back upon his last conversations with one of the most famous human beings of his time (Diego Maradona). In the future-most moment of narration, the narrator now lives in Arizona, and is prompted to gather his notes about these conversations upon learning that Maradona has died. That narrative conceit sets us in place and time in an excerpt that has almost no space for the narrator himself: We do not learn his name, nor much about him at all besides his former occupation as a lesser denizen of the sporting world in which Maradona floated as a God. These conversations eventually unleash information about his past, his former life as a footballer and how it began (this is played as something close to the climax of the piece, discovering his father’s fascination with the sport and so beginning to play), but again, the reflective narrator of the future moment remains shrouded in Arizona.
The most obvious technical choice of the piece is its structure: each paragraph is set apart as its own numbered section, giving us seventeen sections of something close to individual observances of Maradona. The first three of these sectioned paragraphs are preparatory in nature, as the narrator explains his task, finally moving into actual observation of Maradona in section four, wherein we meet the famed footballer in myth-making fashion, watching him stand and walk upon a soccer ball the way lesser beings would the ground itself.
A central conceit to the piece, and one that plays well with the numbered sections, is that we are reading the somewhat haphazardly built notes the narrator has taken around the phone calls with Maradona, rather than reading or remembering the phone calls themselves. Narratively, then, we’re reading recollections written as the narrator re-reads his notes, rather than recollections of the moments. This has the benefit of letting the piece wander, as we’re watching the narrator attempt to put the pieces together himself in something like real-time. It also shifts the purpose of the story, its argument, from being purely and entirely about Maradona to instead being something about the nature of memory and the mythologizing in which we have no choice but to take part.
Another essential technique that once again deeply integrates with these thematic elements: the lack of quotation marks. A fairly small narrative choice, but it both reinforces the distance with which we’re seeing these conversations and also reminds the readers at all times that we’re reading the notes rather than the dialogue itself.
The Art of the Excerpt
This is something we talk about constantly as an editorial team: What are we looking for from an excerpt, how do we define the qualities of a good one, and what draws us to the pieces that grab us? As always, there’s no perfect answer, but this piece hints at a few options: gorgeous language, the hint of something more (whether that be plot, character, tone or mood), and a voice that drops us instantly into the novel’s world.
Look at this opening line: “The part of life I wanted to live is over. Now I just have to be here.” Tension, uncertainty, mystery, a promise of answers forthcoming, in two sentences. The structure of the piece only reveals a bit later that the speaker of that line is not our narrator: the line itself is presented without quotes, standing alone as the entirety of the first numbered section (“1”) of the piece. Voice, both the narrator’s and Maradona’s, propels this piece forward, the large questions that neither man is capable of answering and can only voice late at night when talking to someone else who can share both history and at least some awareness the wild ride that this specific path in life has presented. The narrator is, to a large extent, swept up in the atmosphere and gravity of a man larger than life, and we as readers are allowed to be swept up just as is he.
Often, plot can be the most difficult element of an excerpt to embed, as by definition your readers are seeing only a piece of the whole. A good excerpt builds a structure, which is at its heart a reason for seeing only the moments we’re seeing, and this piece uses that technique to great effect. But it also does give hints to the larger plot, giving us suggestions of what may be coming when we get the full piece: in section eight, we finally learn about the narrator’s “father, the Nazi hunter, the reason my family was in Argentina at that time that Maradona and I first met…” as well as much of the backstory of the narrator being left alone in Argentina as part of the football academy that would prepare him for the life we know he’ll lead. And suddenly, we can begin to see the shape of the narrator’s own struggles: the mother dead of cancer, the father all-but abandoning our narrator, and tying those pieces together with the narrator’s own estranged wife and child. From this point forward, Maradona’s ruminations are braided together with the narrator’s considerations of his younger life. It’s not the plot of the excerpt, which again is structured clearly and heavily around the interaction with Maradona, but it’s a glimmer of awareness toward what else could be coming from the full piece.
And that’s ultimately the goal of an excerpt: It needs to stand on its own as a satisfying moment of fiction, while also serving as something almost like a sales pitch for the larger novel, an argument for why the reader should enjoy the piece on its own and also a justification for why there is more to come. That’s a tough line to walk.
Reality in Fiction
Let’s be very clear: Diego Maradona is a real person. Let’s be equally clear: These conversations with him are fictional. This is not exactly a rare technique, although placing the real person at the absolute heart of the story is somewhat unique. By its very nature, this somewhat upends the implicit contract with the reader, as we are not simply sliding into a story where all elements are made up (we certainly can’t fall back on that classic line about “Any resemblance to actual persons is purely coincidental”). Metatextually, we are deeply aware of the fact that reality is being warped and remolded; that, naturally, is the job of all fiction (to twist reflect back our reality to us, mirror-like), but usually that job is handled in a more symbolic, metaphorical manner.
The interesting thing about bringing reality this deep into fiction is the way that it both subverts and also doubles down upon narratorial authority. There are details in here that could easily be looked up (the excerpt specifically asks itself where in time these conversations are taking place, and ultimately makes a decision that could easily be checked for timeline consistency; there is also a very specific set of details about Maradona’s father that could be anything from fully fictionalized to common knowledge about the man for all I know), but because they are listed as straightforwardly as they are, my inclination as a reader is to believe the narrator immediately (your mileage may vary). In other words, because he seems to know so much so easily, his authority is basically unquestionable, and the excerpt doesn’t need to perform any pyrotechnics to convince us or bring us onboard. This calm certainty, the ease with which information flows through the piece, is a huge lesson for us as writers: bring the world into your story, even in small doses, and it’s significantly harder for any reader to argue lack of trust or believability, those banes of early workshop commentary.
In Conclusion
Excerpts are tough, but this is one of my favorite examples of the genre: Starting with a clear structure that gives it purpose on its own, a clear arc presented with a natural starting and end point, voice that argues for itself regardless of the plot having a climax and clear moment of change or epiphany point such as we’d want to see in a story, and very clear hints as to what the larger work itself might be doing once the novel itself sits in front of us. There both is and isn’t a lot happening here, and we have a narrator who leads us clear-eyed through the maze, embedded in an innovative structure buoyed by a somewhat unique conceit of sectioned notes, and all of this tied in a bow with this tiny interaction with greatness, with the fascination that always comes from being in the presence of world-altering celebrity.
I’m so proud we found this piece, and that we are able to host it for y’all to look at and learn from. I encourage you to do so as you consider your own excerpts, what they are and what they can be and what they’re trying to accomplish.
by Brandon Williams