The Tournament: A Novel of the 20th Century by John Clarke

I haven’t followed tennis in many years, but the U.S. Open this year did pique my interest. E and I serendipitously caught the second half of the Agassi-Becker match last weekend while in our hotel room in Las Vegas, and watching the last of my teen tennis heroes bow out of the spotlight was surprisingly emotional. After I explained tennis scoring to E, we started to watch tennis whenever we had some spare time.

This past weekend, since I was under the weather, I found myself spending a lot more time than I normally do watching TV. Usually, I avoid the television altogether, but this weekend we watched the men’s semifinal and the men’s final, and some of the women’s doubles final. We accidentally missed the women’s final due to a noob time-zone error. But all this tennis reminded me of The Tournament by John Clarke. Booklist describes the book much better than I could:

Imagine, if you will, 128 of recent history's greatest writers, thinkers, scientists, musicians, actors, etc., participating in a two-week tennis tournament. Sarah Bernhardt versus Coco Chanel; Aldous Huxley versus Paul Robeson; Vladimir Nabokov versus Henry Miller--matchups that seem wildly inappropriate and delightfully perverse. Norman Mailer is covering the tournament for Tennis magazine; the tournament referee is Charles Darwin. It's a wacky idea, and although it's mostly played for laughs, the author has somehow managed to make this preposterous premise pay off. The novel, which is structured like a day-by-day report on the progress of the tournament, is completely original, a crash course in the history of twentieth-century culture. The dialogue is cheerfully nutty, as most of the characters speak lines that parody themselves (Gertrude Stein: "A win is a win is a win"). This is one of those novels that shouldn't work and yet somehow it does, leaving us shaking with laughter and possessing a vivid sense of the competition between ideas and points of view that shapes our culture.

I absolutely love the premise of this novel, and the delightful “mockumentary” aspect of the play-by-play. Even without reading any of it, Clarke’s list of match-ups from the back cover already begin to amuse and provoke. Then, almost every line within the book is an inside joke about a cultural icon. Though I know who most every one of the “celebrity athletes” are, I don’t seem to know enough about them to get the jokes. For example, Mr. Wilde and his friend Mr. Whistler have attend the tournament as spectators.

“This really is a marvelous occasion,” said Wilde. “I’m beginning to wish I’d entered.”
“You will, Oscar,” said Whistler. “You will.”

I didn’t get that reference until I looked it up in Wikipedia. I also had to look up the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Hemingway to get the line, “Gertrude Stein watched from the player’s box until Hemingway was forced to deny that she was coaching him with hand signals.”

Unfortunately, all this makes for a somewhat difficult and frustrating reading experience. I think I’m too young for this book yet—in another thirty or forty years, I will have accumulated enough knowledge to be able to read this book straight through, laughing all the way. For now, I can appreciate a paragraph here and there if I am very familiar with the characters. This description of the Einstein-Duchamp’s match I did get, and it made me laugh out loud:

Albert Einstein threw everything he had at Marcel Duchamp this afternoon and for over an hour we saw serving of such intensity that spectators were advised to turn their backs while the ball was being hit and then turn around quickly to see the result…In the second set Einstein’s serve lost some of its penetration and Duchamp began to call out, “Oh, that is art!” whenever he hit a winner. Einstein learned not to bother chasing these shots, and then after a while noticed that they weren’t all winners.

“He had me completely fooled,” he said later. “He was calling things ‘art’ that were actually just rubbish.”

Because I don’t get most of the jokes, I have suspicions that the writing might be too clever for its own good and I just don’t know it. Publisher’s Weekly thought that, “with a new game beginning every few paragraphs, readers are introduced to a dizzying array of characters who never transcend caricature.” In addition, “readers may feel this was a great idea best realized in a shorter, more comic form.” Maybe the book isn’t as well-written as I think it is. Then again, maybe I like this book because I’m not smart enough to know one way or the other. I am content to imagine that every allusion is brilliant, and to aspire to understand more and more of it as I continue on my never-ending quest for knowledge.

The Tournament: A Novel of the 20th Century by John Clarke

Tags: books book+reviews tennis US+Open Duchamp Einstein John+Clarke