Stuart Evers

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

A novel about basketball, using sport as a metaphor for the fractured US, seems laboured and dated – until its final pages

[Alamy] 
issue 04 June 2022

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.

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