A twist on the American classic: The Sidekick, by Benjamin Markovits, reviewed

On the cover of The Sidekick, just below a broken basketball hoop, a quote from Jonathan Lethem suggests Benjamin Markovits is a ‘classic American voice’. Open the book and the first sentence – ‘I was a big slow fat kid but one thing I could do was shoot free throws’ – confirms the kind of American classicism we can expect: Salinger-conversational, Updike-melancholic, Roth-confessional. Male and white, in short. A decade ago, when The Sidekick is largely set, this would be hardly worth mentioning, but for a new novel to stand on such patriarchal shoulders now feels curiously old-fashioned. And while Markovits strives for something more contemporary, it is that voice – of Brian Blum, a sportswriter – that is the novel’s principal strength, but also its weakness.

In the mid-1990s, Brian tries out for the high school basketball team and meets Marcus Hayes. Brian is white, Marcus is black. They strike up a friendship based exclusively on ball games and basketball talk, until Marcus’s mother decides to move to Dallas, whereupon Marcus goes to live with Brian and his family. A couple of decades later, Marcus, who in the intervening years has become a fabulously wealthy former star, chooses to come out of retirement. Sensing a story, Blum signs a six-figure book deal to cover the comeback, negotiating access to his former friend to tell the inside story.

All of this has the distinctive topography of a classic American story: sports as a metaphor for the fracture of the US; friendship as a microcosm of race relations; the innocence of pick-up games in schoolyards vs the cynicism of the big leagues. To a greater or lesser extent, these themes are present in The Sidekick. The trouble is that the reader must go through Blum to find them.