Playing Days
by Benjamin Markovits
Faber & Faber; Paperback;
322 pages; Price: 12.99
ISBN: 9780571251810

Rachel Harris

Playing Days is a Sports Novel of sorts; though this should not deter the less athletic reader. For at every quiet turn of this unlikely bildungsroman – set against the basketball courts of a small German town – Benjamin Markovits frustrates generic convention. Postgame showers are an occasion for rumination more often than rat-tailing, and victories pass without fist-in-the-air ceremony: ‘[we] could have been under water’ recalls the novel’s first person narrator, detailing the moment of his team’s first big win. Indeed genre breaking is one of many ways Markovits questions received ideas about coming-of-age and the fallacies of adulthood – principally that we will achieve self-knowledge, and master our chosen destinies. “Is this it?” is a question that looms large.

The twenty-something narrator of Playing Days – Markovits’ fifth, semi-autobiographical novel – leaves his hometown in Texas to pursue a basketball career in provincial Landshut. Retracing the steps of his father, a once prodigious sportsman, he hopes to assemble enough material to take his first steps as a writer. Neither basketball nor writing strikes him as a natural vocation however – at least not in the soaring, Heleconian sense. Shooting hoops ‘seem[s] a pleasant way of not doing anything else’, whilst writing serves as recreation for his loneliness. By his own admission, he is ‘one of [life’s] drifters’ – impassive, sometimes melancholy, often removed.

At the club in Landshut he meets men similarly afflicted by feelings of disconnection and indirection: Olaf, a black player conspicuous amongst his white adoptive family; Charlie, a closet homosexual holed-up with his secret; and Bo Hadnot, an older American player whose chance of promotion to the major-league is slipping from reach. However it is the narrator’s relationship with Hadnot’s ex-wife, Anke, which forms the backbone of the novel and its insights. An affair motivated by repulsion and desire, Anke crystallises the narrator’s ‘suspicion’ that adults ‘[aren’t] particularly good at [adult life]’. Fond of the kind of ‘conversational games’ we attain with age – the art of saying one thing while meaning another for instance, or fishing for compliments – her amateur, “adult” dramatics leave him cold. Indeed Playing Days is a novel inhabited by unsuccessfully initiated men and women: Russell, the team assistant, sports a moustache that ‘suggest[s]…a mother’s anxiety’, whilst Olaf’s attire has ‘the sheepish…air of a boy introducing you to his parents’. The shadow of childhood flickers over its cast, hinting at the difficulty of becoming one’s own person.

Playing Days is a deceptively slight-seeming narrative, composed largely of ‘empty time’: the ‘non-hour[s]’ before a game starts, and the ‘margin’ of early evenings before practice. Overarching this listlessness however, is a profound desire for shape and structure – visually encapsulated by the arcs and dotted lines of the playing court. The everything-in-its-right-place behaviour of the narrator, for example, betrays his underlying desire for mastery (‘I [always] travelled light, just a duffel with a spare of everything…[which] I washed…by hand’), whilst the countless A-B journeys made by foot, bus and car in the course of the novel create a kind of taut, internal fretwork. In this way Markovits creates a subtle cartography – one that establishes the tension between his characters’ vague aimlessness and their will to be in control.

These are the kind of quiet pyrotechnics that make Playing Days a remarkable and surprising novel – one that reflects on our often ham-handed attempts to make sense of life and limitation. The view through Olaf’s apartment window, ‘ornate with silence’, would serve just as well to describe Markovits’ poised, Orwellian prose – the perfect showcase for his narrator’s inner revelations. This is a beautifully constructed, compassionate work.