Doubles

May 31, 2010
Brown (Floodmakers) returns with another excellent ensemble character study, this one focusing on a group of friends and lovers radiating out from former tennis doubles partners Slow and Kaz. Slow holds himself responsible for the car accident hat put his wife, Anne, in a coma, and has since hung up his racket. After months of stopgap clerical work and depression, he is rescued by his eccentric and charismatic coach, Manny, who is trying to force Slow into a reunion with his former tennis partner, Kaz. So begins an ill-fated trip to New York, where Slow contemplates returning to the game and learns heartbreaking truths about his wife, his friends, and himself. The story has far more to say about love than tennis, but it ponders a changing sport as it transitions from the world of the impeccably mannered Arthur Ashe to bad boy Andre Agassi with the same care that it examines the inner life of its characters. The result is that rare sports novel with big heart and wide appeal.

May 15, 2010
A professional tennis player learns just how hard the ball bounces.

After gathering much praise for his first novel, Brown (Floodmarkers, 2009) fails to bring his A-game to this muddled, melancholic follow-up about a professional athlete. The protagonist and narrator, Slow Smith, was once one of the best tennis players in the world, a doubles champion with a 148-mile-per-hour serve and a faithful partner in his hell-raising childhood pal, Kaz. But 23 years later, Slow is a ghost of his former self, taking charity gigs in the wake of the terrible car accident that put his pregnant wife Anne in a coma. Once Slow learns that Kaz was sleeping with his wife, he starts to go a bit bonkers. In a rare opportunity for original humor, Slow challenges Kaz to a duel but recants. Wallowing in his worsening misery, he drinks too much, canoodles with two former classmates and makes jarring, dichotomous declarations that disrupt the flow of an already prickly story."I felt alive, dangerous. Free," he says during a legendary hangover. Later,"I am a barbarian." Only during Slow's visits to Anne does his true nature emerge. Every day, Slow takes a Polaroid of his wife, maintaining her own habit of photographing him."They all looked like someone who had at one point been my wife, had once been alive, had once kissed me and started to cry because she was afraid I wouldn't love her as much once the baby was born." While Brown clearly has a gift for language, the caustic dejection of his main man overwhelms the book's black humor, and Slow's potentially redemptive return to the sporting world is virtually an afterthought. By the time Anne is resurrected from her deep sleep, it's difficult to see what she ever might have seen in Slow, even in the ghostly echo of a thousand photographs.

The line between comedy and tragedy is thin. This one swings hard but misses.

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Starred review from July 1, 2010
This is the story of professional tennis player Slow Smith and his two partners: Kaz, his tennis doubles partner since boyhood, and Anne, his wife, a photographer documenting their life together through a series of Polaroids. Slow is currently off the circuit, since Anne is in a coma, the result of a car accident for which Slow is to blame. While Anne is unconscious, Slow obsessively continues her photographic journal. Together, Kaz and Slow are highly ranked, but Kaz, who fanatically follows good-luck rituals, isn't finding the same success playing with other partners. This story unfolds as Manny, Slow's coach and manager, tries to reunite Slow and Kaz and inadvertently involves Slow with other sexual partners at the same time. Comedic sexual escapades, tender sciences of love and loss—this work from the author of the critically acclaimed "Floodmakers" a series of interconnected stories, has it all. VERDICTThis tale of contemporary life should resonate with a popular audience. Brown may be the John Updike for a new generation.—Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati State Technical & Community Coll. Lib.

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