Shortly after graduating from Yale in 1995, novelist Benjamin Markovits (You Don't Have to Live Like This) departed for Germany. There he spent a year playing basketball for a minor league team while searching for his identity as a writer. He's transformed that experience into the frank, disarming autobiographical novel Playing Days, originally published in England in 2011, now in print in the United States for the first time.
Though he never played college basketball, on the strength of a homemade video showcasing his shooting skills, the Texas-born Benjamin Markovits of the novel improbably lands a contract with a second division team called the Yoghurts in the small medieval town of Landshut, about an hour's train ride from Munich. He joins a ragtag band of teammates that include American Bo Hadnot, at age 30 aching for one last shot at the NBA, and Karl (modeled on the superstar Dirk Nowitzki, with whom the author played), an undisciplined German teenager whose preternatural talent already has him marked for greatness. His assimilation, such as it is, is helped by the fact that his ancestors are German--Jewish on his father's side, Christian on his mother's--and that he's fluent in the language.
The protagonist's life is complicated when he falls in love with Anke, Bo Hadnot's estranged wife and the mother of his three-year-old daughter. In scenes that are striking both for their insight and for the chasteness of their characters' behavior, Markovits effectively portrays Benjamin's stumbling entry into the adult world. Transported to his ancestral home, the young man also finds himself wrestling, for the first time, with the question of his mixed religious heritage.
Markovits nails the mind-numbing repetition of the team's twice-a-day workouts and the tedium of traveling for hours by bus through the German countryside to play a game before a few hundred fans. Readers who aren't basketball enthusiasts may find themselves skimming the novel's intermittent game scenes, but those who love the sport will grasp quickly Markovits's talent for describing the rugged ballet that is its essence.
Contemplating his writing career, the narrator confesses to Anke that he wants to write stories about "people who don't have any major flaws, who don't do anything stupid or wrong, and who don't suffer from any unusual bad luck." Modest as that ambition may seem, it's precisely what Benjamin Markovits has done here. That he's done it so artfully makes Playing Days such a pleasing novel. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Benjamin Markovits's autobiographical novel Playing Days is the affecting story of a young man starting to find his way in the world through basketball.