Sport and sex are the two most reliable activities designed by reality to mock novelists. Fun to engage in, and occasionally fun to watch, their thrills begin where prose leaves off. The risks for writers are the same in both cases: on the one hand, boredom; on the other, embarrassment. The bloodless play-by-play or the frantic gush.
Playing Days – Benjamin Markovits's fifth book – begins with a youthful sexual awakening. Not an encounter, but a confluence of hormones and exertion, a "slow spread of strange sensations" during a workout that begins as a moment of private awkwardness and registers as a small remembered embarrassment. Such moments are common in Markovits's writing, which increasingly wants us to notice the many small ways that our outer selves can betray us, by blushing or twitching, by softening in the wrong places or stiffening at the wrong time.
Sport is the art of controlling those physical contingencies, of showing your working-out. Like sex, it can offer, in a fine phrase struck by David Foster Wallace, a "reconciliation with the fact of having a body".
Like Wallace (once "a near-great junior tennis player") Markovits has athletic credentials. After college, where he played a little basketball in his spare time, he filmed an audition video – dribbling, shooting, dunking – on the strength of which he was recruited by a German second-division team. Playing Days is less a record of his playing year than a story about it: Markovits may have set aside, for a moment, the able pastiche of his Byron trilogy to write a story with himself as the main character, but we can't be sure how much is drawn from life. When "Ben Markovits", the narrator, recalls writing The Syme Papers alongside his Bavarian diary, he notices a strange mingling of experience: "the two files had a way of bleeding into each other". The line confirms a pattern in Markovits's novels, in which people occasionally pop up in the wrong story or obsessions and phrases echo between works. An anecdote here about one of Ben's team-mates seems to be borrowed from John McPhee's seminal basketball book, A Sense of Where You Are. Perhaps it's coincidence, or part of the common lore of the sport; but McPhee has a good line on the nature of basketball, which applies equally to Playing Days: "a game of subtle felonies".
There are the author's felonies, and then there are Ben's, as he falls into an affair with the ex-wife of one of his team-mates – an American second-rater by the allegorically unlikely name of Bo Hadnot – and the best parts of Playing Days concern this relationship. The repetitiousness of sports writing mars some of the on-court passages: Markovits's descriptions of the game have neither Updike's erotic charge in Rabbit, Run nor the fuller-throated late-Beat rhythms of Bob Levin's neglected classic The Best Ride to New York. At times the prose lacks polish, and it may be that the roughness is one of those subtle felonies of fiction, a kind of texture in the style of an accomplished writer trying to come to terms with a version of his younger self. Markovits writes here of a player who can control "the beat of the game" without becoming enslaved to the rhythm of the ball. "Like an actor who can turn a line of blank verse into ordinary speech, Charlie had mastered the art of being natural." The author seems to want to reverse that mastery, or to recognise, by a kind of artful awkwardness, the effort required to achieve it.
How far can you go on effort alone? Sympathy for the frustrated ambition of the minor-leaguer is the common thread of Markovits's fiction. He wants to know what happens when our talents fail to match up to our desires, and to show the gradual erosion or adjustment of those desires that can ensue. If success is a struggle even for the gifted, he asks, "What chance do the rest of us have to give a reasonable account of ourselves… ?" With all its imperfections, Playing Days attempts to give such an account – a self-conscious self-fashioning by a writer with his eye on the major league.
