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Summary
Summary
An unforgettable, illuminating story of how men live and how they survive, from Abraham Verghese, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Cutting for Stone and The Covenant of Water, an Oprah's Book Club Pick.
"Heartbreaking. . . . Indelible and haunting, [The Tennis Partner] is an elegy to friendship found, and an ode to a good friend lost."--The Boston Globe
When Abraham Verghese, a physician whose marriage is unraveling, relocates to El Paso, Texas, he hopes to make a fresh start as a staff member at the county hospital. There he meets David Smith, a medical student recovering from drug addiction, and the two men begin a tennis ritual that allows them to shed their inhibitions and find security in the sport they love and with each other. This friendship between doctor and intern grows increasingly rich and complex, more intimate than two men usually allow. Just when it seems nothing can go wrong, the dark beast from David's past emerges once again--and almost everything Verghese has come to trust and believe in is threatened as David spirals out of control.
Author Notes
Abraham Verghese was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1955. He received an M.D. from Madras University, India, in 1979 and came to the U.S a year later to do a residency in Tennessee. He also earned an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1991.
Verghese has been involved mainly in medical research and teaching. His specialties include internal medicine, pulmonary diseases, geriatrics, and infectious diseases; the latter has led to an interest in AIDS, which has been the subject of much of his writing. Verghese's thesis was a collection of stories about AIDS, and he then went on to write My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS. My Own Country received the Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction and was selected by Time as one of the top five books of 1994.
Verghese is also the author of The Tennis Partner: A Doctor's Story of Friendship and Loss, and his short stories, articles, and reviews have appeared in magazines and newspapers such as North American Review, Sports Illustrated, and MD.
Verghese, who is divorced, has two children, Steven and Jacob and resides in El Paso, Tex.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In his eloquent memoir, My Own Country, Verghese described a parallel story, that of a stranger (himself) and AIDS both becoming part of a rural Tennessee town. Once again, Verghese weaves his own story with that of a place and another person to come up with something moving and insightful. As he tries to cope with a new job on the faculty of Texas Tech School of Medicine, the move to El Paso and the breakdown of his marriage, he meets David, a medical student and former tennis pro. Tennis matches with David reawaken Verghese's passion for the game, and soon the two become regular partners. Their connection is complicated by their shifting roles: Verghese, David's teacher in the hospital wards, becomes his student on the tennis court. For Verghese, the matches offer an escape from loneliness; for David, a recovering drug addict, even more is at stake. Only on the court can they reach a state of grace: "our tennis partnership was special, different, sacred like a marriage." Ultimately, as David's life takes some disturbing turns, Verghese finds himself forced to choose between his role as friend and that of authority figure. While David's story provides the main narrative drive of the book, it's interwoven with Verghese's descriptions of his AIDS patients, his relationship with his sons and meditations on El Paso's distinctive landscape. It's a hard trick but Verghese combines all these elements into a cohesive whole, moving easily between moments of quiet reflection and anxious anticipation. If, as he writes, "to tell a life story [is] to engage in a form of seduction," then Verghese is a master of romance. Agent, Mary Evans. Author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Verghese had just taken a teaching position at Texas Tech University Medical School when he met intern David Smith, a former tennis pro who turned to medicine when his athletic career ended. With twice-weekly meetings over a net, a shared profession, and other common interests, the two became good friends. Verghese found in Smith and tennis a refuge from his own failing marriage and general middle-age angst. Just as Verghese began to discover renewed satisfaction in his work, Smith's life became engulfed in turmoil. He had a number of destructive relationships with women, and, a former drug addict, he lapsed back into substance abuse, which left him unable--physically or legally--to continue in medicine. This is a meditation on friendship, its fragile underpinnings, and, sadly, its limits. But it also reveals that through the shared experience of sport, men especially can forge a relationship as enduring as any marriage. A melancholy and powerful reading experience. --Wes Lukowsky
Kirkus Review
The acclaimed author of My Own Country (1996) turns his gaze inward to a pair of crises that hit even closer to home than the AIDS epidemic of which he wrote previously. Verghese took a teaching position at Texas Tech's medical school, and its his arrival in the unfamiliar city of El Paso that triggers the events of his second book (parts of which appeared in the New Yorker). His marriage, already on the rocks in My Own Country, has collapsed utterly and the couple agree to a separation. In a new job in a new city, he finds himself more alone than he has ever been. But he becomes acquainted with a charming fourth-year student on his rotation, David, a former professional tennis player from Australia. Verghese, an ardent amateur himself, begins to play regularly with David and the two become close friends, indeed deeply dependent on each other. Gradually, the younger man begins to confide in his teacher and friend. David has a secret, known to most of the other students and staff at the teaching hospital but not to the recently arrived Verghese; he is a recovering drug addict whose presence at Tech is only possible if he maintains a rigorous schedule of AA meetings and urine tests. When David relapses and his life begins to spiral out of control, Verghese finds himself drawn into the young man's troubles. As in his previous book, Verghese distinguishes himself by virtue not only of tremendous writing skillhe has a talented diagnostician's observant eye and a gift for descriptionbut also by his great humanity and humility. Verghese manages to recount the story of the failure of his marriage without recriminations and with a remarkable evenhandedness. Likewise, he tells David's story honestly and movingly. Although it runs down a little in the last 50 pages or so, this is a compulsively readable and painful book, a work of compassion and intelligence.
Library Journal Review
Following his sympathetic treatment of AIDS patients in the celebrated My Own Country, one of LJ's Best Books of 1994, Verghese offers this study of a doctor friend (and tennis partner) whose life is ruined by drugs. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
