Review: Adult friends plan to confront their high school teacher/tormenter in 'Speech Team'

Tim Murphy's novel "Speech Team" begins with a short scene featuring four friends who reunite after years apart to "avenge the mortifications of youth."

It is February 2013 and all have briefly swapped the cold and damp of the Northeast for an undertaking in Sarasota, Fla. As they drive to a mystery address in a rental car, they each try to keep their nerves under control. But when they approach their destination, a ranch home on a residential street, one passenger panics at the sight of an old man on the front steps and tells the driver not to stop. Fear wins, ruining any chance of the reckoning they had planned.

An aborted mission would normally make for an anticlimactic opener. However, Murphy ensures there is enough character outline and plot potential to keep readers turning the pages. A potent sense of mystery lingers: Who are these people, what did they set out to accomplish and what triggered the alarm that derailed their plan?

Murphy's narrator is Tip Murray, who is going nowhere in his job as a nonprofit writer. He lives with partner Marcus in Providence, R.I., but years of drink and drugs have rendered him "the needy one — the emotional vortex, the broken thing repaired with Scotch tape."

One day, he receives a text out of the blue from long-lost friend Natalie, informing him that Pete, their fellow high school pal — and Tip's first crush — has committed suicide. This tragedy prompts Tip to meet up with hippie farmer Nat and track down two other former friends: Jennifer, now a professor, who was one of the only Black students at Mendhem High, and Anthony, a successful menswear designer.

Tip's three friends plus Pete were once his "compadres in square-pegdom." All five were on the speech team, "that apex of geekery." Pete's final Facebook post singled out their coach, Gary Gold, for a caustic comment he made. The quartet reminisces and they each reveal that, 25 years ago, they too endured Gold's wounding barbs or inappropriate behavior.

They travel to Florida to confront him. But when they finally pluck up the courage to take him to task, their showdown doesn't go the way they intended.

Tonally and thematically, Murphy's novel is not as hard-hitting as his previous two — "Christodora" (2016), which tackled activism, addiction and the AIDS crisis, and "Correspondents" (2019), about a young reporter dispatched to war-ravaged Baghdad. Still, "Speech Team" manages to be a hugely absorbing and deeply heartfelt tale about friendship, unhealed scars and second chances. If some of its later moments are a little saccharine and the outcomes too neat, the novel's grittier, messier episodes are far more engaging. We follow Tip's progress keenly as he unravels, loses his way, and realizes he is chasing ghosts instead of exorcising demons.

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and Wall Street Journal. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Speech Team

By: Tim Murphy.

Publisher: Viking, 288 pages, $28.