Tricky Muscularity

Underspin: A Novel by E. Y. Zhao, Astra House, 304 pages, $28

If we’re being honest, table tennis is kind of dinky. It’s a game played in the interstitial moments of life: between meals at a resort, in a basement belonging to someone you’d rather not hang out with. It doesn’t feel like a sport and certainly doesn’t read like one. Chasing a ball around a table is an exercise in humiliation. Even its name is derivative, an add-on to tennis, an actual sport with running and strength and speed. Is there even enough room to run in ping-pong?

E.Y. Zhao disagrees. “What better sport,” she writes through Kristian, the enigmatic coach of Ryan Lo—the athlete at the center of her debut novel—“than this one of millimeter margins and symmetry, jewel-toned surfaces and sound, speed and brute perseverance?” It’s a good point. Like Challengers did to tennis last year, Underspin might do for table tennis. Zhao’s debut is wildly ambitious and searingly brilliant, jolting the reader with devastation, nostalgia, embarrassment, prestige, and sex—all in a completely unexpected field. The table is a battlefield, the players guns, the ball a bullet. More weighty still is what happens off the court: a richly imagined world where athleticism bleeds into narratives that are empathetic and sharp, tender and tight. Perhaps it’s more praise than the sport deserves, but under Zhao’s deliriously smart pen, Underspin makes you believe a small plastic ball can hold the weight of the world.

Zhao follows the template Jennifer Egan laid out in A Visit From the Goon Squad: a tangential character can become a leaping-off point into something entirely new. Across Underspin, the reader inhabits the perspectives of Ryan’s coach, doctors, paramours, childhood friends, elderly spectators, club owners—but never Ryan himself. His perception is always filtered through others, which is fitting: his personality and competitiveness invite a spectrum of jealousy, infatuation, and pride.

Ryan is bold and brash, talented and desperate, strong and elusive. The first time we see him, he climbs into the rafters at a wedding and refuses to come down. He has an affair with a married former movie star; plays Fruit Ninja with a friend angling for athletic tips; tricks clubmates into getting stranded on a rooftop; travels to Germany for tournaments, only to be sent home; takes jobs at small clubs coaching students. Each vignette refracts Ryan’s psyche from a new angle, some previously unseen corner of his malleable self.

Zhao’s sentences often wind the reader with their brilliance. During his affair, Ryan and Susanne “went undisturbed up the gray stairwell, brushing its silently quavering rails; down the glittering, polished wood hallway; into the master bedroom, the white bedspread like the geisha robe she’d thrown atop a smatter of cloth blossoms, many films ago, so that a warlord in a glued-on Fu Manchu could pretend to ravish her, actor’s hairy nostrils whistling as he held himself over her on flabby forearms, except now she sat on the foamy duvet for real, the first and only take, running her hands down the sides of a man who stood there of his own volition.”

It’s a sentence not only technically dazzling but also freighted with the weight of another imagined story, one Zhao conjures and then discards in a breath.

Elsewhere, an envious friend “happily admit[s] that he sucked at cricket when his father made him play, that push-ups still wind him, that the last night he saw Ryan, he punched the pillow trying to dissipate his indignation; and that when his parents return will he feel encroachment rather than relief, that only when they are compromised can he find the spiky edges of self that stamp others so distinctly onto the world.”

This is a book to reread, each pass uncovering fresh details and attitudes. It’s almost a disadvantage that Zhao introduces such a constellation of voices—but not quite. And even the fragments carry weight: “All you can do is acknowledge and channel your nature,” Ryan’s coach observes.

Zhao’s prose is winding, tricky, muscular. You can’t skim Underspin. Every turn of phrase, aside, and character arc demands the reader’s attention. But the rewards are great: “You can’t regret a match,” the coach says, “it was decided in practice months ago. You can’t seek the past; it has turned its back on you, and you cannot choose, if it ever does turn again, which face it presents to you.”

The novel’s epilogue gathers these flourishes into a fireworks finale, one brilliant sentence tumbling over the next, risking dilution by excess. But too much spectacle is better than not enough.

There is so much heart in Underspin it’s almost overwhelming. Most of its vignettes could be expanded into novellas of their own, yet Ryan still eludes full capture, slipping from one character’s perspective to the next like a particularly irritating Whack-a-Mole. Zhao seems to argue that the attempt itself—impossible but gratifying—is the point.

Underspin is meaty with brain and brawn, radically alive in surprising ways. A tremendous writer of fiction is born.

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Sam Franzini is a writer in Washington, DC. He is an editor at The Line of Best Fit and a staff writer at OurCulture Mag and Northern Transmissions. His journalism has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Hobart, and NYLON.