Elizabeth, you
ask, how does Andre Agassi’s autobiography fit into your series on Anna Karenina?
It doesn’t. But I
have to interrupt the series and talk about this book that made me read it cover
to cover when I meant to read only the first couple chapters. I just finished it last night and I’m eager
to share it with you, if for no other reason than that I’m still shocked that
I, not especially a tennis fan, devoured Agassi’s book. In fact, I’m so poorly versed in tennis that I
recognized Agassi’s name primarily from memorizing it as a good guess for any
tennis-related questions that my high school In the Know team encountered back
in the day. (I know, this makes me sound
like the quintessential dork and is therefore probably not something to confess
on a public blog…all this autobiography stuff must be rubbing off...)
More amazing still, I’d wager that most non-tennis folk who
give Open a try would find themselves
hooked, too.
In part, the book’s appeal comes from the vicarious thrill
of living an incredible career and with seeing more of that career than just
the fame and the fortune. Agassi really does come off as a down-to-earth guy
with no real designs on the vast wealth he ultimately obtains, and so there’s
this kind of underdog, rags-to-riches allure that we Americans have
historically loved and continue to love.
In fact, Agassi’s story has a lot of the same elements that draw us to
many movies and books: the domineering father, the ill-fated romance, the
fairytale romance, the nice moral to care for other people, and the lesson that
hard work pays off.
But if the book had just these archetypical plots, I doubt I
would have picked it up in the first place, and I certainly wouldn’t have
continued reading. What Agassi offers is
an intimate look at the struggle for vocation that everyone, in one way or
another, wrestles with through their young adult lives and into their twenties,
if not well beyond. Agassi’s grand claim
and recurring theme is that he hates tennis.
He seems to think his confession will shock everyone, and maybe, if I
were a die-hard tennis fan, it would.
But people who love their jobs are as rare as happy marriages—they do
come along , but they are the dear pearls on a beach full of ordinary sand.
I appreciated the honest struggle, and part of what makes it
work so well in the book is the way it’s punctuated with real, tangible,
win/loss situations. No tennis match
recounted in the book was dwelt on in a way that tested my patience, because no
match felt as if it were included for the sake of the sport alone. Instead, it was part of the search for
motivation, for Agassi to find what he did and didn’t want, for him to observe
how these other players approached tennis and, by extension, vocation.
A similar struggle with vocation occurs in the novel I’m
currently drafting, and a friend of mine who reads my work and who also happens
to arrange his life around Roger Federer matches, saw the similarity and recommended
I read Open. But whether one reads Open for a character study (unlikely) or for an interest in Agassi
(more likely), the pleasure quickly becomes that of personal
identification.
Whenever you read a first-person
narration, it’s hard not to identify with that first-person narrator. Of course, in fiction we have the unreliable
narrator, and there are certainly elements of that here too. For one thing, I was skeptical—and the
acknowledgements confirmed my skepticism—that Agassi himself sat down and wrote
this; indeed, he credits J.R. Moehringer with “transform[ing]” (Agassi’s word)
transcripts from their personal interviews into this story. It’s an autobiography only insofar as Agassi
himself was involved in the process. We
expect artifice in fiction; we want reality in autobiography, subjective though
its presentation will be. For another, I
caught glimpses that—for however much I read along with “Agassi” and identified
with him—if I had actually met Agassi at many points in his career, I would not
have gotten along with him. Chilly and
determined as Pete Sampras comes across in Open,
I can see, when I step away from the lure of Agassi’s “I,” that I would be
faster friends with Sampras than Agassi (insofar as Agassi’s memoir represents
the two). And then, of course, we have
to be constantly aware of the subjectivity—that this is Andre Agassi’s story
and not Mike Agassi’s story, etc. etc.
Don’t get me wrong: subjectivity is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s essential to autobiography.
But now here’s my shocking confession: for as much as I
identified with Agassi and was rooting for him, I actually felt a little
disappointed with the final chapters—not because I wasn’t glad that he had
finally secured his reputation and his wealth, wooed Stefanie Graf, experienced
the joys of fatherhood, and established a thriving charity. I was glad, glad in a more genuine way than
we usually are for people who make it so big because I understood the
difficulties he’d faced in getting there.
And yet, after such struggle, the book comes down to pat and usual
morals: caring for others, caring for education, caring for family. I don’t doubt his love for his wife, children,
and charity, but it suddenly all seemed so storybook that it lost its ring of
authenticity.
Which is as much a lesson for fiction as for life.
A few weeks ago, in my “Cornucopia of Recommendations” post,
I said you couldn’t go wrong with a Thomas Hardy novel. Much as it pains me to admit it, I have
to take back the remark. I recently
finished reading Hardy’s lesser-known novel Two on a Tower, and while there
were some features of it that were classic Hardy, it certainly didn’t live up
to the usual Hardy experience.
