Tennis Lessons: artificially done
I really did not like this book. I don’t even get it. It’s dry and oversimplifies life, not in a good way where you can read between the lines, like in Hemingway’s “Hills like White Elephants” where the writing is elegantly detached. Here, everything is just badly simplified. All of the book is written in second person, and the main character is referred to as “you” throughout the book. That’s okay, but it also doesn’t create as much empathy for the reader as Dickey might want. It feels like a mature novel written by a teen. Many miserable, but ordinary graphic scenes, and no meaning or depth behind them. Just plain depressing. The writing was artificial and stale. The plot was sterile because there was no plot. We follow “you” from when “you” were 3 or 4 years old, all the way to “your” late twenties, not having a purpose in life, and not finding satisfaction. It’s almost the opposite because pleasure is somehow found in “your” suffering. It’s actually quite a devastating book. Lots of trigger warnings before picking it up.
One could totally read this book out of order, the way the Netflix show Kaleidoscope is supposed to be watched. I don’t think that will change the essence of the story. I did that — I started picking through parts of the book before doing a full read-through to catch anything I missed. Because there’s no plot, it doesn’t really matter. But I haven’t read anything this bad in a while. smh would not recommend it.
But maybe for a little redemption, the author herself writes this passage earlier on in the book:
You wish your class could read books about something other than war and the children of war; you want to read about normal people trying to do normal things. You want to know in detail … what [the characters] think about when they look at themselves in the mirror, what happens when they try to walk quickly when the ground is frozen and slippery, what they say when they get an unexpected phone call. You suspect the horrors of war are easier to navigate emotionally — everything is awful and so there is only one way to respond to it, with hopelessness, sadness. Normal life seems more difficult, and you want instructions on how to move through the world.
