Tennis, Anyone?

Abraham Verghese has two passions: being an internist and playing tennis. The Tennis Partner combines both with some other addictions thrown in. This is a memoir of a younger intern who Verghese befriends in El Paso, Texas. The young man, David Smith, is a former tennis pro and it awakens in Verghese all his inner tennis nerdiness. He keeps journals of every play and tip he's ever received. They begin to play together whenever possible. The book is also about Verghese's failed marriage and he and his wife's attempts to protect their children from any hurt or pain. But primarily it is the story of Smith's addiction and struggles with cocaine which Verghese slowly learns about.

The book reminded me of Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty about her difficult friendship with Lucy Grealey, where at the end of the book you're not so enamoured with the self centered selfish Lucy but with Patchett. David Smith is pretty uninteresting but Verghese is so excited by the fact that he was once a pro that he ignores all his other flaws. And you get so carried away by Verghese's enthusiasm for both tennis and medicine that you don't mind David tagging along.

Look at Me

I'm on a Jennifer Egan bender, as must be the rest of America, since she just won the Pullitzer Prize for A Visit from the Goon Squad. This is more of a novel than the loose interwoven stories of Goon Squad. It's about a fashion model who is in a terrble car accident and has major plastic surgery done to her face and a young adolescent girl living in a small town who is loosely connected to her. This is quite good, as all her writing seems to be.

Atkinson,Kate

I love Kate Atkinson and this wasn't bad but it wasn't great. She has this ability to throw multiple narrative balls in the air and juggle them all sucessfully, but this time it just didn't seem to work as well. Jackson Brodie was back but just wandering around aimlessly with some new characters that I can't even remember now. Not the cause for celebration it should have been.

Cutting for Stone

Verghese can tell a story better than anyone. It is a big old fashioned story of twins born to a British surgeon and an Indian nun in Ethiopia. It reminds me of Rohinton's Mistry's A Fine Balance, the characters pulling at your heartstrings, although without as much squalor.

Verghese is actually a doctor and while reading the book I feel like he had secretly operated on me, removed my heart and held it in his hands throughout, it's one of those books where they hold you prisoner, he had my heart in his hands until the very end where he put it back in and sadly stitched up the opening as I put the book down. As a doctor too he relished some of the medical information that I could have done without but other than that he can really write a good story.

I Think---No I Know---I Didn't Love This

I Think I Love You was about a 12 year old Welsh fan of David Cassidy and a man who writes in the voice of David Cassidy for the fanzine. The biggest disappointment in the book is apparently that the stuff in the fanzine's was not true, David Cassidy's favorite color was NOT BROWN. The biggest thing about this novelist is that she is married to Anthony Lane. How can she actually allow him to read her stuff. I blush to think of it.

Visit From the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan's Visit from the Goon Squad was very very good. It was a delight from start to finish...vivid characters and situations all weaving in and out of different stories. Close up you could take each story separately and then step back and see it as a cohesive whole. Time was fluid and dizzying. You're in the not so distant future when toddlers are addicted to their 'starfishes', which are some sort of handheld device that eerily sounds like an Iphone a few years from now, and then back in the 1970's listening to the start of punk in the backseat of a car.


The story is vaguely about the music scene and a few recurring characters who play a part in it. Structurally it reminded us (unofficial MV bookgroup pick)of Olive Kittredge or the Imperfectionists by Tim Rackman. I hope however that this does not spawn a whole series of the 'lots of short stories crammed together to make a novel' genre. It worked for them but I can see it not working for others.

I have gotten a couple more of her books to check up on her ouevre but if this is any indication she deserves all the prizes Jonathan Frantzen's novel didn't get.