The Sidekick
By Benjamin Markovits
Faber, £18.99

9780571371525 (1)

The London-based British American writer Benjamin Markovits has published 10 novels and in 2013 was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. He grew up in Texas and Germany, where he played professional basketball (the subject of his 2010 novel, Playing Days).

In The Sidekick Markovits returns to the world of sports. Or, rather, he returns to his particular take on the world of sports. Playing Days was one of his best novels because it was as much about disillusionment as it was about basketball. The book was suffused with small-time failure. It was a powerful bittersweet story about what becomes of lonely young men when their dreams go sour.

The same is true of The Sidekick. When we first meet the narrator Brian Blum, he is “a big fat slow kid” at high school in Austin, Texas. He tries out for the school basketball team where he meets two key figures in the novel, the basketball coach, Mel Caukwell, and a gifted young black basketball player, Marcus Hayes. Hayes becomes hugely successful, winning four championships for the Boston Celtics in the early 2000s and he’s now making a comeback with a new team. Blum becomes a talented sportswriter, but as the novel moves backwards and forwards in time, we begin to realise that Blum is not as successful as we might have thought. “Maybe this is my chance,” he says at a crucial moment, “maybe I can start again.” His friendship with Hayes gives him the chance to write the inside story of his famous high-school peer.

There are obvious echoes here of Richard Ford’s classic The Sportswriter (1986), the first of four novels by Ford about Frank Bascombe, a failed novelist-turned-sportswriter who undergoes a crisis following the death of his son. It is interesting that both Ford and Markovits are drawn to the darker side of American sports writing rather than to its glamour.

The key difference between Bascombe and Blum is that Blum is Jewish but only sort of Jewish. “My dad,” he says early on, “is a Passover-Hanukkah-Rosh Hashanah-Yom Kippur kind of Jew.” Brian isn’t even that. His Jewishness is more a red herring than a schmaltz herring. This is more gentile Middle America than the world of Bellow or Roth. Austin, Texas, is the state capital of Texas, with a population of more than a million, but from the novel’s beginning in a high school, Markovits lends it an oddly small-town feel.

The heart of the novel is the relationship between Blum and Hayes, partly based on the real-life relationship between Brian Windhorst, like Blum an ESPN writer, and the LA Lakers star, LeBron James. Blum is a sportswriter, but he’s more interested in sport as a kind of metaphor. His subject, he tells us, “is what I wanted to spend my life writing about, natural selection, the way people get measured,” that “some people are better and some people worse, but there’s actually always somebody better.”

This is the key sentence in the novel. It isn’t just about the contrast between Blum and Hayes, a hugely rich sporting superstar, it’s not even mainly about basketball. It’s about how some people succeed and some fail in their professional and personal lives and perhaps about how America is failing. Whether or not you are interested in basketball, this is what draws us in. Much of the novel is set in the 1990s but The Sidekick has the melancholic and sour feel of Biden’s America and proves why Markovits is one of the best American writers of his generation.