Creative Sports Writing

Page 20 American Book Review Creative Sports Writing Neil D. Isaacs Passing Through Tom LeClair Drinian Press http://drinianpress.com 282 pages; paper, $14.95 Tom LeClair’s Passing Through completes the Michael Keever trilogy after Passing Off (1996) and Passing On (2004). The cover copy announces it as a “stand-alone novel,” but a critic or reviewer who buys into that hype does a disservice both to the author and to his readers. It is as if a panel of a Hieronymus Bosch triptych were to be called a stand-alone painting or the freestyle laps of a Michael Phelps individual medley were to be timed without reference to the other strokes or Le Temps Retrouve (1927) were to neglect Le Cote de Chez Swann (1927) and Le Cote de Guermantes (1920) or the eight other volumes of “ways” that lead us there. From A to Z (John Updike’s Angstrom, Philip Roth’s Zuckerman), serial fictions have long been a staple of our literature. Setting aside the commercialized phenomena of sequels, prequels, and spin-offs, consider how James Lee Burke, Jerome Charyn, Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, James W. Hall, Donna Leon, William Murray, Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson, and John Sandford (to name a few in no special order) pursue the evolving and aging careers of, respectively, Dave Robicheaux, The Pink Commish, Harry Bosch, Elvis Cole, Thorn, Guido Brunetti, Shifty Lou Anderson, John Rebus, Alan Banks, and Lucas Davenport; the reader is engaged both by the familiarity of procedures, cross-references , and stylistic idiosyncrasies, and by the subtle departures from type. I would identify a half dozen exemplars of the multi-text form: Daniel Fuchs’s underrated “Williamsburg Trilogy”; Henry Roth’s obsessive Mercy of a Rude Stream (1994); Mark Harris’s inimitable Henry Wiggen books; William Gibson’s brilliantly inventive “Cyberspace trilogy”; William Kennedy’s masterly Albany novels; and George Garrett’s “Renaissance Trilogy”—Death of the Fox (1971), The Succession (1983), and Entered from the Sun (1990)—arguably the greatest unsung work of its time. Each of these presents a novel way of interrelating separate fictions in a whole that outdoes their individual excellence. Finally, at the risk of having this piece read like a peckish if not puckish parody of Roberto Bolaño; acknowledging that I slipped a Scot, a Brit, and an ex-pat in Venice into the list above; and resisting the lure of detours to Gormenghast, Middle-earth, and Narnia; I would mention three landmark works of twentieth-century English fiction: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, and Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. The point is that each of these uses the serial format in a distinctive and highly original way, that although most of the individual volumes may stand alone each is diminished by being blinkered out from its siblings, and that the whole is always greater…. And that is precisely the measure of LeClair’s accomplishment . Passing Off (along with Alan Lelchuk’s Playing the Game [1995]) showed that basketball fiction could rise to the literary heights traditionally reserved for baseball novels like Jerome Charyn’s Seventh Babe (1996), LaMar Herrin’s Rio Loja Ringmaster (1977), Roth’s Great American Novel (1973), and Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor (1992). LeClair’s name does not appear on the title page; with a Nabokovian device, he presents the book as an autobiographical account of the narrator’s “Season in the Greek Basketball Association.” Moreover, we soon learn, because of the rules governing team membership, he has had to fake his name as Kyvernos, claiming that his grandfather had changed it to Keever, when “actually” his grandfather had been a McKeever. Our player/ narrator is now three removes from the author, wearing a double mask, itself covered with an additional deception since he must conceal the name change from his wife,Ann. In his pressing need to play the game(s) and get paid what he’d been promised, Keever is trapped into an involvement with desperate eco-terrorists. Their conspiracy supersedes the focus on basketball , while reflecting the play of the games in a distorting mirror and...