US writer Benjamin Markovits has long been interested in what it means to be moderately successful – what the narrator of 2010’s Playing Days, his autobiographical novel about his time as a basketball pro in the German second division, calls “honourable mediocrity”.
His new novel follows Paul Essinger, an American tennis player who reached a grand slam quarter-final at 21 but has never come close since, despite once beating Nadal when, Paul suspects, the Spaniard had “a flight to catch”.
We join Paul four days before a first-round tie in the US Open, in what could be the last match of a journeyman career that has made his father “inordinately proud... and at the same time bitterly disappointed”. He’s contemplating retirement to his home town of Austin – a plan he’s concealed from his ex-model girlfriend, Dana, who looks after their two-year-old son while bearing the brunt of Paul’s pre-match nerves, not to mention organising his parents and three siblings, in town to watch him play.
Their reunion is at the heart of the novel, as Markovits even-handedly gives each of them airtime, from Paul’s younger sister, Jean, a television producer sleeping with her married boss, to his brother, Nathan, a Harvard legal scholar courted by the government on account of his willingness to make the case for murder by drone.
Grudges soon surface, and the book bubbles with well-caught bickering. “Do you want me to go?” Dana asks Paul, flaking out of a get-together the night before the match:
“It’s up to you.”
“Is it rude if I don’t go?”
“It’s not rude either way. You should do what you want to do. I can’t tell you what that is.”
“I don’t care, but if you want me to go, I’ll go, if you want me to see your family....”
Structuring the book around the looming tournament brings in-built suspense to what essentially amounts to a bundle of domestic vignettes; I found myself worrying two-thirds of the way through, the day before the tournament starts, that Paul, whirling his son around, might do his back in.
But ultimately, it’s a book to be savoured less for its page-turning propulsion than for its granular evocation of family life. The ending – no grand payoff – is deliciously poised, adding to hints from the narrative’s occasional habit of zooming proleptically into the future that this hugely enjoyable and unashamedly old-fashioned novel might become the basis of a Galsworthy-style Essinger saga.
• A Weekend in New York by Benjamin Markovits is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
