About this episode
Carl and I discuss the second pick of the Tennis Abstract book club, a 1960s novel that didn't turn out to have much tennis in it at all. We talk about whether the brief bits of tennis in the book swing above their weight, why Updike would have his characters (occasionally) play tennis instead of other sports, and why tennis seems to be underrepresented in fiction. It's not Updike's best work, and like our last book club pick--Gordon Forbes's memoir A Handful of Summers--it's very much of its time, but it gives the reader (tennis-focused and otherwise) plenty to think about.