the tennis players
I’ve just finished reading The Tennis Players by Lars Gustafsson. It’s a very short novel, just 92 pages, so it only took me one morning to read, but I imagine I’ll be thinking about this book for a while. I’ve yet to meet a Lars Gustafsson novel I didn’t like. His work is characterized by quiet, contemplative narrators who bring to their observations a depth of thought and breadth of knowledge that is often missing in contemporary fiction. If you haven’t yet read Gustafsson, I suggest you begin with Death of a Beekeeper, then move on to A Tiler’s Afternoon, The Tale of a Dog, Sigismund, and The Tennis Players. We all know someone to whom we are grateful for introducing us to an author's work at just the right moment in our lives. I owe my early love of Gustafsson to Joanne Meschery, who was my professor for a class in form and theory of fiction at the University of Arkansas in 1995. One of the books she had us read was Gustafsson's story collection, Stories of Happy People.
The Tennis Players was first published in Sweden in 1977, and the English translation was released in 1983. It takes place in Austin, Texas, in 1974. The narrator, a professor named Lars Gustafsson, “is teaching a seminar in nineteenth-century European thought and quietly perfecting his game of tennis” (from the book jacket). The story takes place on the tennis court, on campus, and, briefly, in an underground desert bunker where a rather unstable amateur tennis player named Chris spends three days a week monitoring the Southern Air Defense District’s operations computer for Strategic Air Command, a powerful division of the Defense Department.
I won’t summarize the book—you simply must read it. But there is one passage I wanted to point out, on page 63. The professor is playing tennis with Abel, a former pro who has played at Forest Hills, won the Australian Open, and come in second at Wimbledon twice, but who “prefers to play here with people who come by.”
Abel gives the faltering professor a bit of tennis advice. “Never think about the ball that’s gone. It’s gone, whether it’s good or bad it’s gone just the same. There’s never any ball except the one you’ve got in front of you.”
The same can be said for an author’s books, or for your own stories. There comes a time when a book is sold and published and has made the rounds of the reviewers, for good or bad. A time when a story has been revised three dozen times and has been sent out to various literary magazines, where it has been accepted or rejected. A time when a book or story is part of a writer’s past, as irrelevant to one’s forward motion as ex-boyfriends, senior prom, and one’s first job.
Remember this: there’s never any story except the one you’ve got in front of you.
the exercise:
Choose two to three stories that are truly past. They may be past because you’re revised them to the best of your ability, or they may be past because you’ve simply outgrown them as a writer. We writers do that, you know. We outgrow books and stories the same way we outgrow the little black dress we bought to celebrate our 21st birthday. If we are writing dutifully, and reading thoughtfully, and living a life both of the mind and of the world, our writing matures and deepens. It may be a sad discovery that a story you wrote two years ago, which at the time seemed brilliant, is no longer something that you feel particularly proud of; but any serious writer will experience this over and over again. Don’t despair: it’s a sign that you’re getting better.
Now, today, begin a brand new story.
2:12:18 PM 
|
|
