"Tennis Lessons" by Susannah Dickey

 

A book narrated in the second person which is an incredibly unusual thing to do.

It is, I suppose, a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel. 'Your' story starts at three years old and progresses to twenty-eight. 'Yours' is a very ordinary life in a normal house in a normal town, you go to a normal school. You're a bit of an ugly duckling but you are clever and quick-witted. Unfortunately, perhaps because you are bullied for being 'weird', this doesn't translate to academic success at school. The first part of the novel takes you to the threshold of your school-leaving exams in a series of snapshots taken through the years. The second part of the book recounts some traumatic events at the time of the exams and their consequences. The third part returns to the snapshot format and considers the fall-out.

It was well-written and viscerally rooted in ugly everyday reality. No murders, no superheroes, no death-defying struggles, no grand adventures. Just ordinary life. But there was drama, there was tension, there were challenges to be overcome, there were little triumphs, there were larger disasters, there was even, of a sort, love. This makes it as weird but as honest and as truthful as its protagonist, who says: "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." (Part One: 13 years old - May) The wish has here been granted.

Selected quotes:

• "Your stomach yodels with hunger." (Part One: 11 years old - February 11th)
• "You wonder if she likes her life, or if she, like you, is dependent on the idea that things will improve." (Part One: 17 years old - December)
• "The thought of going makes you anxious. The thought of not going makes you anxious." (Part Two: 17 years old - May 16th today)
• "You imagine it's much easier to endure unhappiness if you have a child who is beautiful and clever and loved. What have you been worth?" (Part Two: 17 years old - May 16th today)
• "When you get closer you realize it's a dead kitten. Its legs are curled up into its torso and its head is pressed to its chest. It looks like an asterisk and a closed parenthesis; a bass clef; the curved end of a hockey stick." (Part Two: 17 years old - May 16th today)
• "It's a bit like talking to someone who's wearing a space helmet, like everything you say to her is muffled and there's a time delay in her response." (Part Three: 22 years old - March)
• "A Sunday carvery approach to religion" (Part Three: 24 years old - December) It means an approach to religion that just selects which bits the believer wants to follow eg abortion bad, adultery yes please.
• "Sprinkle the salt of your dreams on the slugs of your enemies." (Part Three: 27 years old - November)
• "Perhaps living contentedly is just finding pursuits that distract you from thoughts of oblivion. It occurs to you that everyone else probably figured this out long ago." (Part Three: 28 years old - August)

A book full of the troubles of growing up. Well worth a read.

February 2024; 240 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God