The Tennis Partner
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In My Own Country, named one of the five best books of 1994 by Time magazine, Abraham Verghese ventured into the valley of the Smokey Mountains, where he bore witness to the arrival of AIDS in a town that had never expected the disease or its terrible consequences. The New York Times Book Review called the book “an account of the plague years in America, perfectly written, fascinating and tragic, by a doctor who was shaped and changed by his patients.” As an African-born Indian, Dr. Verghese revealed something essential about our American soul, reminding us, said Washington Post Book World “of what is honorable and charitable in the way humans behave toward each additional.” My Own Country presents an unflinching portrait of men and women facing the prospect of premature death, yet sometimes learning for the first time in that bleak circumstance how it is to live.
In 1991, Verghese stirred west, bringing his wife and two young sons to the boarder town of El Paso, Texas. There he crossed paths with David Smith, a medical student who came to America from Australia on a tennis erudition and played briefly on the pro tour before deciding to become a doctor. Recognizing some spark of commonality–perhaps just that of two strangers on the very edge of America–Verghese cajoled him into playing tennis again.
On the wards, Verghese is teacher and mentor as he guides David through hard and sometime colorful clinic problems seen in a country hospital. He teaches him how to read the signs from the human body, to use his hands to percuss, and to use his mind to listen. On the tennis court, their roles are reversed: The clinician becomes the student–nearly. David helps Verghese hone his strokes and sharpen his game. But Verghese, a compulsive collector since childhood of tennis lore and trivia, a compiler of notebooks on tennis heroes, transient styles, and trendy strategies, rekindles David’s like of the game, a like burnt out by the brutal competitiveness of the professional circuit. Perhaps this is how friendship between men are born: art work and at play.
When the two men test their newfound bond, their friendship becomes something reasonably remarkable. Verghese confesses that his marriage is failing–and David admits that he is a recovering intravenous cocaine addict, struggling mightily to hold on to his girlfriend, his career, his sobriety. Against the stubborn, unyielding backdrop of the desert, their relationship grows increasingly rich and complex, more intimate than two men usually allow. Whether they are cycling on Ancient Mesilla, seeing a critically ill uncomplaining, or commiserating about a failed romance, each anticipates the additional’s needs, is there to buttress a fall, or to celebrate the tiny victories: David’s graduation, Verghese’s son’s birthdays.
Just when it seems that nothing can go incorrect, that friendship will be able to conquer all, the dark beast from David’s past emerges once again. As Verghese scrambles to rescue him, David proves that he is friend to everyone but himself. When David spirals out of control, nearly everything Verghese has come to trust and judge in is threatened. It is a defining moment, the kind each of us must eventually face–it is from such misfortune that our lives are carved.
The Tennis Partner is a remarkable journey to the ends and the edges of friendship, to its heights of intimacy and clarity, and also to its hellish depths of deception and treachery. It is, above all, an unforgettable, illuminating tale of how men live, and how they survive.Amazon.com Review
What is it about sports that makes some men wax as mystical as a Castanedan Yaqui? In the hands of writers such as David James Duncan and Norman Maclean, the simple, repetitive motions of baseball, glide-fishing, and golf have bought nearly numinous significance. In The Tennis Partner, Dr. Abraham Verghese takes on his own fascination with tennis and comes up with as excellent an explanation as any: “In the way we controlled the movement of a yellow ball in space, we were imposing order on a world that was fickle and variable. Each ball that we place into play, for as long as it went back and into the world between us, felt like a charm to be added to a necklace full of spells, talismans, and fetishes, which one day add up to an Aaron’s rod, an Aladdin’s lamp, a magic carpet. Each time we played, this feeling of restoring order, of mastery, was awakened.”
For both Verghese and his tennis partner, a fourth-year medical student named David Smith, the game is a much-needed island of order in the midst of personal chaos. Both men are struggling to rebuild their lives, Verghese undergoing a painful divorce, Smith struggling with an intravenous cocaine addiction. For a brief, idyllic period, their friendship flourishes; Verghese mentors Smith in the examining room, while Smith, an Australian who competed briefly on the pro circuit, ends up Verghese’s teacher on the court. But there are dark corners to David’s personality, and under the mounting pressures of medical school and his increasingly intricate like life, these come to the fore. Even as he learns how to inhabit his new life, Verghese watches with horror as his friend relapses, dries out, then relapses again. The leader of the powerful My Own Country, a chronicle of caring for AIDS patients in rural Tennessee, Verghese once again proves that the skills of a excellent doctor are strikingly similar to persons of a excellent writer. Careful observation, compassion, restraint: these are the instruments Verghese uses to stunning effect in The Tennis Partner. A paean to the healing powers of tennis, this book is also a moving meditation on friendship, fatherhood, like, addiction, and the particular loneliness of physicians. –Mary Park
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I am amazed that a name can consider type of relationship discribed here to be one of very close friends….the book title more aptly displays the depth of feeling, in my opinion. This book might be loved by a name who adores tennis; as one who has no point interest in it, persons long segments of the book have no appeal…they might as well be discussing bowling…anything physical. This allows the writer to skirt issues as a replacement for of allowing close human interaction. I am amazed that what most women would consider an aquaintance, this writer considers to be a close (only?) friend. I reflect he has emotionally arrested development, though he seems kind, and most likely is an able physician.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
If life’s been a bowl of cherries, but you’re curious about the pits, read this. I’ve played tennis for 40 years, seen plenty of addiction and mental illness, but establish this book — though well-written — in the end, simply depressing.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Whether or not you have a background in medicine, this book will draw you in and keep you interested. The only parts that may seem a bit tedious to run through are some of the tennis sequences. This may seem odd coming from a tennis player, but reading about tennis is like watching grass grow. But, the sequences do bring additional parts of the book together, and they are honest.
My only additional issue is Verghese’s constant romanticizing of El Paso, neighboring Juarez, and their inhabitants. Having lived here for nearly three years (*and* having worked as a physician in the hospital he mentions in his novel), I can promise you that the innocence, the bluster, and the graciousness of his side characters is nearly completely fictional.
I don’t reflect it would have detracted from the book to described the city and the people more accurately.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I had looked forwards to this book, expecting an inciteful analysis of friendship and drug addiction. I loved “My Own Country”, and lookd forwards to enjoying this book as much. I was sorely disappointed; irritated by travel book descriptions of El Paso, smug case histories of patients, egocentric self-analysis of the leader’s relationship with others. I establish small to clarify WHY the two men were friends, outside of being tennis followers, and nearly no incite to the problems faced when a friend has a drug addiction. Perhaps my expectations were too high, you can’t permanently hit a home run.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
I establish “The Tennis Partner” disappointing because ultimately Dr. Verghese has small insight into his acquaintances heart or mind. The use of his acquaintances life as a taking-off point seems exploitative. The repetitive passages on Dr. Verghese’s self-described insightful diagnostic methods and his obsessive meanderings about tennis strike me as simply egocentric. That the book derived from journal musings is all too clear. It is marred as well by some writing errors, for example, the feeling that his head was caught “in a vice.” It does serve as a warning about the misshaping of the person that can take place in the medical pressure cooker, but I judge not, ironically, in the way the leader proposed.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5