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 includes American Bo Hadnot, at age 30 aching for one last shot at the NBA, and Karl, an undisciplined German teenager whose preternatural talent already has him marked for greatness.
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. He 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.
That he's done it so artfully makes Playing Days such a pleasing novel. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer