There Are Levels To This

I'm pretty sure John McPhee can make any topic interesting.

Which is to say, you might balk at reading a 150-page profile of two tennis players interspersed with a recap of what seems like virtually every point of their four-set match — unless John McPhee wrote it, in which case you will be completely engrossed in it.

It helps that one of the players profiled is Arthur Ashe, who you know has to have an interesting story. And it also helps that it covers an interesting point in competitive tennis history when amateurs and professionals played together in "open" tournaments (i.e., the "US Open"). And it helps that it takes place during an interesting time in U.S. history — 1968, when . . . aw, hell, you know.

All that said, you probably still wouldn't want to read Levels of the Game. And that'd be a mistake and which is why book club is a good idea when it gets you to read stuff you wouldn't normally read.

I will say that I assumed it'd probably be good but that's only because we'd read The Pine Barrens, which was another book about a topic — the "backwater" part of Southern New Jersey where squat pine trees grow — that you thought you'd never be interested in but which actually was interesting.

So while Levels is about tennis, it's not so much that it's about "more" than tennis — too many documentaries and nonfiction pieces seem to use "it's more than" as a cheap ploy to pull you in: Angle bracket literature (">"). Rather it — like all good nonfiction, I suppose — helps you appreciate the game that much more — on a, er, different level, I suppose.

There is something special about the dramatic irony of the arc of Ashe's life, but the pieces that Levels compiles were written contemporaneously, while Ashe was still a young amateur player, and obviously long before his AIDS diagnosis. But that just gives the book some historical significance; it's still interesting in an of itself.

It's interesting to read how Ashe and Clark Graebner, Ashe's opponent profiled in Levels, lived so modestly as amateur players. Both had other jobs, for one. Also interesting was how much Ashe read — you just don't see tennis stars today as that well read or intellectual — most athletes in general come off like savants or machines who work on their game to the exclusion of anything else in the world. McPhee makes a comment along the lines of that although Ashe reads a lot he's not intellectual; today, anyone who reads anything at all is probably "intellectual"; it's crazy to think that there was a time in the U.S. when people actually read.

Obviously — at least I think it's supposed to be obvious — the race part is an important part of the book. Ashe's biography is important in that respect, and McPhee certainly addresses it, first subtly and then more directly toward the end of the book. So it's also interesting how close the two competitors are if not in cultural background then at least in competitive background, and how for each of the personalities the game seems to take over. Hard to express, but in the side-by-side biographical sketch of the two players there's something less "other" seeming about the two men when they're sketched out side by side. It's an interesting take, and given what was happening across the country in 1968, it could be seen as a little provocative: The through line for both players is an intense work ethic, and although McPhee shows differences, ultimately there seems less different about the two men.

Even if you don't see it that way — and to be fair, the entire book has example after example of the two players' divergent styles and backgrounds — you can't help but read Levels and feel like the U.S. is somehow less cohesive than in the 1960s, which is both fascinating and kind of frightening.