(no subject)

[skygiants]

I was sold on E.Y. Zhao's Underspin by this post via sleepnoises -- I also love books with Big Hole in the middle that do interesting things with POV! I also love a book that tells you at the beginning that the protagonist is already dead and then lets you sit with that tension for the next however many hundred pages. Pre-haunted by the protag, if you will.

I didn't quite love Underspin, as it turned out, but I do think it's really interesting as a structural project. We start at the funeral of almost-great table tennis prodigy Ryan Lo, his parents waiting for his coach to show up, which he doesn't. Then we go back in time and begin tracking Ryan's career through the eyes of various people who intersect with him over the course of his twenty-five years -- some who spend years with him on major life and career-altering enterprises, and others who cross his path for a day, a weekend, a single table tennis tutoring session at the local club. (My favorite POV character is the very elderly woman whose daughter is forcing her and her husband to take table tennis As A Retirement Activity despite their absolute lack of interest.)

Each of these chapters essentially functions as a little short story about a person who is at least tangentially involved with table tennis. They're all caught up in their own lives and problems, and also Ryan is also there, visible and attention-grabbing, handsome and talented and apparently destined for success, a perfect lightning rod for whatever insecurities the POV character happens to be feeling at that time. Through the structural distortion effect, though, it increasingly becomes clear that there's something wrong about Ryan's relationship with his coach, and the unease of that runs through the book, which began at Ryan's funeral.

I did kind of want more of a structural distortion effect ... from the description I was expecting a series of first-person narratives, The Moonstone-like, but on a prose level most of the book is actually written in more or less the same third-person MFA short story style, with a couple of exceptions. I didn't really click with it and it did detract a bit from the tension for me; I wanted a little more psychological horror, a little less wistful melancholy. But I think that's mostly an expectation-reality mismatch. I did like that there's never really a 'gotcha' moment, that by the time some truths are revealed you are not surprised by them, and that everything stays deeply ambiguous, deeply ambivalent, through the end. Also, there's no question that the book absolutely understands The World of Table Tennis.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Fascinating! I like what you say about the structure of the book, though I still don't really understand what you the Instagram poster mean by a big hole in the middle. Is it that you-the-reader have to do the deducing about whatever's going on with Ryan and his coach, rather than having it explicit?

Cackled at "third-person MFA short story style."

[skygiants]

Yes -- inasmuch as there's a reveal it comes in the form of one character saying that Ryan told her what happened [but she suspects he was minimizing events] [and this incident is filtered through the POV of another character who would prefer not to believe her] and we as readers can guess and put things together but it will never be more than hearsay, as indeed it is to the characters within the book.

[shehiemal]

"I did like that there's never really a 'gotcha' moment, that by the time some truths are revealed you are not surprised by them, and that everything stays deeply ambiguous, deeply ambivalent, through the end." This description reminds me of The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone by Felicity McLean, to the extent that I had the slightly funny experience, when I read this paragraph, of reading "I did like ... not surprised by them" and thinking oh! like The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone! and then reading the rest of the sentence, which is also true of both. The cover copy on my copy of The Van Apfel Girls ended by calling it a story "with a shimmering absence at its heart," so it seems these two are cut from the same something.

(If the comparative-literature enthusiasms didn't already give me away, I definitely want to check out Underspin!)

[chestnut_pod]

Hm, this does sound intriguing. I feel like literary books which are sufficiently immersed in The World of X are often my jam, regardless of whether or not I like their MFA-style prose.